Elon Musk is accelerating the growth of his startup xAI, which raised a whopping $6 billion during its most recent Series B funding round.
It has just been less than a year since its launch in July, and it seems that xAI is already getting ready to challenge OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015.
According to xAI’s announcement, the company is focused on advancing a truthful and competent AI that will benefit humanity, with the mission of understanding “the true nature of the universe.”
"The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. The mission is to create a 'maximum truth-seeking' A.I."
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) May 27, 2024
— Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/8vuSscvYGv
“The funds from the round will be used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” xAI’s blog post wrote.
xAI’s major investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Kingdom Holding, Sequoia Capital, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, Valor Equity Partners, and Vy Capital.
In March, xAI released GROK 1.5, an update that allows the open-source large language model (LLM) to offer “long context understanding and advanced reasoning.”
Meta’s AI Chief Reacts to Musk’s Recruitment Post
The X owner and Tesla CEO is very vocal about his support for xAI, and it’s not surprising that he reposted a recruitment post by AI engineer Igor Babuschkin.
However, what seems to be an innocent post encouraging qualified people to apply to xAI was used by Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, in a derisive post.
LeCun called Musk a boss who “claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform,” among other things.
Join xAI if you can stand a boss who:
— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) May 27, 2024
- claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).
- claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).
- claims to want a "maximally rigorous pursuit…
LeCun’s post seems to be a continuation of his disagreement with Musk’s view of AI being an all-powerful technology.
In March, Musk posted on X a clip of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast with computer scientist Ray Kurzweil with the caption, “AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined.”
LeCun rejected Musk’s view by reposting what Musk wrote.
No.
— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) March 14, 2024
If it were the case, we would have AI systems that could teach themselves to drive a car in 20 hours of practice, like any 17 year-old.
But we still don't have fully autonomous, reliable self-driving, even though we (you) have millions of hours of *labeled* training data. https://t.co/IqsAYQHfdW
Meanwhile, some criticized LeCun’s latest post against Musk, with one user commenting, “Yann woke up and chose violence,” and another one asking to “explain what you have against Elon.”
To this, the French-American computer scientist replied, “I like his cars, his rockets, his solar panels, and his satellite network. I very much dislike his vengeful politics, his conspiracy theories, and his hype.”
