In a move that surprised exactly no one who has been paying attention to Elon Musk’s naming conventions, the billionaire entrepreneur has officially launched his own artificial intelligence company and has given it the most on-brand name possible: xAI. For those furiously searching their keyboards for a reason, it appears the logic behind the name mirrors the reasoning that prompted him to rename Twitter as simply “X”. Yes, it is that deep.
The company’s rather enigmatic website announces the company’s rather enigmatic mission, which is, sit down for this one, “to understand the true nature of the universe.” Of course, nothing screams “simple achievable roadmap” quite like taking on the metaphysical secrets of existence itself. Naturally, this mission statement leaves room for interpretation, confusion and a fair amount of philosophical chin scratching.
Musk announced xAI on Twitter, the platform he now owns and refers to as “X”, proving once again that vowels are optional luxuries in this new era of tech branding. The announcement did not include a product, a prototype or even a launch date for anything particularly useful, but it did reveal a team of literal AI heavyweights. These include former researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, Google and Tesla who have presumably been entrusted with helping Musk outpace the competition and perhaps decipher the aforementioned nature of the universe in their down time.
“We are a separate company from X Corp but will work closely with X and other companies to make progress towards our mission,”
the website stated, in a sentence so reminiscent of a corporate lanyard slogan that it nearly issued a press release of its own.
xAI will reportedly focus on developing an AI that is “truthful”. This is presumably in contrast to existing chatbots that already lie, cheat on tests and confidently make up academic citations with all the brazen abandon of a university student five hours before a deadline. The new venture, according to Musk, will seek to build AI that is “curious” and “seeks the truth” which, to be fair, sounds a touch less dystopian than “outcompete humanity across all cognitive tasks”. So that is… something.
There will be a Twitter Spaces chat scheduled for Friday, where Musk and his team will expand on their plans, possibly while answering zero questions in great detail. Details on xAI’s funding are unclear, though given Musk’s current habit of rebranding things with a single keystroke, it is possible the budget was partially underwritten by simply canceling the Twitter bird logo.
In summary, Elon Musk has launched a new company with a name that sounds like a password reset requirement, is run by experts who seem terrifyingly qualified, and whose mission is to unlock the secrets of the universe using artificial intelligence. What could possibly go wrong?
Next stop: enlightenment, or at least a really enthusiastic chatbot.