Tesla CEO and Twitter Owner Elon Musk Launches New Company xAI

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Today’s Highlights:

• 👨‍💼Tesla CEO and Twitter Owner Elon Musk Launches New Company xAI💻

• 💸Funding News: Mosaic Raises $26M💰

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s New AI Company, xAI, Geared Towards Human Safety

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly grown in the last few months and turned into quite an asset for both creators and users. Tech giants such as Microsoft and Google have OpenAI and Bard, and opposite them are open-source communities creating LLMs of their own, like Anthropic with Claude.

By the looks of it, the development of LLMs has only just begun. Just recently, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk launched a brand new AI company, xAI, with hopes of building an alternative to existing artificial intelligence chatbots.

Prior to the announcement, there had been reports of Musk securing thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia, enough to power a large language model. Just last April, during a taped interview, Musk also revealed that he wanted to start a new AI initiative called “TruthGPT” to create truthful and ambitious AI systems not trained to be “politically correct”. Thus, the launch of xAI was more than expected.

AI Fear

Musk believes that having AI trained to be politically correct is just another way of getting AI to say untruthful things and mislead humans, which Musk fears might lead to the annihilation of humankind. Musk aspires to create an AI whose goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe”, and by doing so, he trusts that he is leading humankind to safety. How so?

It is undoubtedly true that AI systems have become human-competitive at certain tasks, resulting in a rivalry of sorts between humans and AI, as seen in the Writer Guild of America strike, for example. AI has expeditiously become advanced as time goes by, and its advancements are feared by Musk, expressed through an open letter created by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization campaigning for the responsible and ethical development of AI, signed by Musk.

Said letter contains statements questioning whether humans should let machines flood their information channels with propaganda and automate fulfilling jobs. As the development of AI continues, it is feared that nonhuman minds may outnumber and replace humans, risking the loss of our civilization’s control.

As a result, the institute requests for all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months until it is ensured with complete confidence that AI systems’ effects will be positive and that their risks will be manageable.

In another letter created by a San Francisco-based nonprofit Center for AI Safety, tech leaders such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Musk have cautioned about the risks AI poses to society.

The letter shapes AI as an entity just as dangerous as nuclear wars and pandemics in relation to human extinction and that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks”.

So, in the midst of all this fear Musk seems to clearly relate to, why is he creating another generative AI system?

Musk’s Vision and Team

By creating a system whose mission is to understand not merely the world but the universe, with humans being a substantial and interesting part of it, there is less risk of humans being wiped out. Musk believes that this AI system’s creation might be the best path to human safety.

It seems a mission as ambitious would require great minds, and that is exactly what the team Musk has assembled have. To build xAI, Musk recruited former members of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla, who have worked on DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-4 chatbots.

With Musk’s clear vision geared toward safeguards for humans, the creation of xAI may be justified. Whether it would compete with existing AI chatbots, however, we’d have to find out upon release.

Musk and his team will be conducting a question-and-answer session on a Twitter Spaces chat for anyone interested to know more about xAI on Friday, July 14th.

Funding News

Mosaic Raises $26M

Mosaic is a San Diego-based tech company that provides a centralized, automated platform for financial strategic planning. Founded by Bijan Moallemi alongside Joe Garafalo and Brian Campbell, the trio met whilst working in Palantir in 2012 and was assigned to do financial planning & analysis. They felt the toolkits provided for them were frustratingly slow and highly inefficient and complex.

This discovery pushed the trio to then build a platform that would address the technical challenges modern-day finance and business teams have to face. Mosaic is described as a “real-time planning and analytics” platform providing dashboards and modeling and data visualization tools, one of them named Metric Builder.

Said tools allow users to look through data and get a sense of when they should execute their financial plans, like when they should raise another round of funding or when they should expand their sales team. All the data provided by Mosaic’s software would mean IT requests can decrease, giving employees more time to handle other assignments instead of busy work.

With the $26 million raised, Mosaic plans to focus on the platform’s AI capabilities and introduce new tools along the lines of Metric Builders that allow customers to create, analyze, and plan custom financial metrics. AI will be made a core part of Mosaic’s platform to empower strategic leaders.

Find out more about Mosaic here.

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