By John Ikani
Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Tesla and Twitter, is reportedly developing plans for a new artificial intelligence (AI) start-up to compete with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
Musk is assembling a team of AI researchers and engineers and is in talks with investors from SpaceX and Tesla to put money into the new venture.
The new company is said to have secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia to build a large language model capable of producing human-like writing and realistic imagery.
The move may raise eyebrows in the AI community given that Musk had previously led a call for a pause in the development of GPT-style models over safety concerns.
If successful, Musk’s entry into the generative AI market would add yet another venture to his already diverse portfolio, which includes running Twitter and Tesla, founding SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
According to insiders, Musk is recruiting engineers from top AI labs, including DeepMind, and has already brought on board a former DeepMind employee, Igor Babuschkin, and roughly half a dozen other engineers.
Musk left OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed group he co-founded in 2015, three years later amid clashes with its management, including over attitudes to AI safety.
Since then, he has become increasingly vocal in his fears of broader existential threats from AI systems and has publicly criticised OpenAI for becoming less transparent and too commercially-minded in its pursuit of advanced AI.
Musk is concerned about the threat of models like GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest release, to spew falsehoods and show political bias.
His new AI venture is separate from his other companies, but it could use Twitter content as data to train its language model and tap Tesla for computing resources.
Although the AI team’s exact position within Musk’s corporate empire remains unclear, he recently moved Twitter Inc, which he bought for $44bn last year, into a new holding company, X Corp.
Musk’s potential entry into the generative AI market would enter an increasingly crowded and well-financed market.
Tech giants Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are jostling with start-ups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Adept, and StabilityAI, who have together raised billions of dollars in recent months.
It remains to be seen how Musk’s new AI venture will fare, but one thing is for sure: he’s not afraid to take on big challenges.
