For several years now, Elon Musk has been critical of how OpenAI operates, and on Wednesday, Musk officially launched a rival.
Elon Musk officially launched his new generative AI company, called xAI, on Wednesday and its stated mission is "to understand the true nature of the universe."
Musk announced the company on Twitter, which he also reincorporated under an entity called X Corp. after buying the social media company last year.
"Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality," Musk tweeted.
It's unclear what these lofty mission statements about the universe and reality mean, but a new website for xAI invited people to learn more and meet the team during a live Twitter Spaces event on Friday.
"We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission," the website also says.
In April, the Financial Times reported that Musk was developing the new AI company. At the time, Musk was the sole director and Musk's personal wealth manager Jared Birchall was also listed as its secretary.
xAI is registered as a Nevada corporation, according to a document filed with the California Secretary of State and signed by Birchall. A location in Burlingame is listed as the company's principal address, and a postal box in Austin is listed as its mailing address.
The new company is also staffed with people who previously worked at other artificial intelligence and tech companies including OpenAI, Google's DeepMind, Microsoft and Tesla, the website says.
Among them are Igor Babuschkin who was a research engineer at DeepMind for around five years, according to his LinkedIn account. And he was also a "member of technical staff" at OpenAI for around 17 months.
Ten other people are listed on staff, including former Google research scientist Christian Szegedy, former DeepMind researcher Toby Pohlen, former OpenAI technical staffer Kyle Kosic, and Ross Nordeen who was a technical program manager at Tesla.
Nordeen also reportedly helped manage the chaos at Twitter last year after Musk's takeover, according to Business Insider.
Musk's announcement of xAI comes a day after Anthropic publicly launched its own generative AI chatbot, called Claude 2.
Based in San Francisco, Anthropic is backed by Google, Salesforce, Zoom and other investors, and has raised more than $1 billion.
Reid Hoffman's Palo Alto-based Inflection AI is developing what it describes as an AI-powered personal assistant called Pi which is launched in June. Inflection AI has raised more than $1.5 billion, including a mega-round it announced at the end of June which included a mix of capital and cloud computing credits.
OpenAI sparked the generative AI and chatbot race last year when it launched ChatGPT, and the San Francisco company updated it to its most advanced version, GPT-4, in March.
That same month, Musk signed an open letter calling for a six month pause on the development of advanced AI systems.
