According to an article published Friday by the Financial Times (FT), the new entity must compete with OpenAI, the Californian start-up that has designed ChatGPT, a generative AI program capable of interacting with humans and producing all kinds of texts on demand.

The success of this interface since its release at the end of November has launched a real race for this high-potential technology.

Since the end of February, various specialized media have reported that Elon Musk is investing in this area.

According to their anonymous sources, he recently recruited Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both of whom worked through DeepMind, the AI arm of Alphabet (Google's parent company).

He also reportedly bought some 10,000 GPUs — computers needed to train language models, the foundation for generative AI systems.

The entrepreneur signed a call last month to take a break from research on the latest generation AI.

The hundreds of signatories evoke various risks related to this technology, and ask themselves in these terms: "Is it desirable to develop non-human minds that could ultimately surpass us in number and intelligence, and replace us?"

Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, before leaving the company in 2018.

the new X.AI entity must compete with OpenAI, the Californian start-up that designed ChatGPT © Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP / Archives

He has since criticized the company, saying in a tweet last December that it trains AI to be "woke" (term designating a fringe of the American left), that is to say to "lie".

The official X.AI registration document, dated March 9, 2023, lists a single director, Elon Musk, and a secretary, Jared Birchall — a former Morgan Stanley banker who manages the multibillionaire's fortune, according to the FT.

"X" is a mathematical symbol that the boss of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and Neuralink is particularly fond of.

Before the acquisition of Twitter he made cryptic allusions to "X", his vision of an application to do everything (messaging, social network, financial services ...), like WeChat in China.

He recently changed Twitter's name to "X Corp", and the headquarters of the social network is no longer in Delaware (where most American companies are located) but in Nevada.

It is found in the name of one of his children, a boy baptized X Æ A- 12.

© 2023 AFP