A few quotes:
Musk incorporated a company named X.AI on March 9, according to Nevada business records.
For the new project, Musk has secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia, said people with knowledge of the move.
Musk is recruiting engineers from top AI labs including DeepMind, according to those with knowledge of his plans, who said he began to explore the idea of a rival company earlier this year in response to the rapid progress of OpenAI.
Musk has brought on Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind employee, and roughly half a dozen other engineers. The Information previously reported Babuschkin’s early talks with Musk.
The new company would allow Musk to take on OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed group that he co-founded in 2015. He left the board three years later amid clashes with its management, including over attitudes to AI safety, according to two people who were involved in OpenAI at the time. Shortly afterwards, the organisation morphed into a for-profit start-up and raised a $1bn investment from Microsoft.
Since then, Musk has become increasingly vocal in his fears of broader existential threats from AI systems. He has also publicly criticised OpenAI for becoming, in his view, less transparent and too commercially minded in its pursuit of advanced AI. Musk is particularly concerned about the threat of models such as GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest release, to spew falsehoods and show political bias.
Wonderful news! Good old Elon! I was worried that there might be some last fragment of hope lying around uncrushed.
On the bright side… Nope, I’ve got nothing.
I’m having trouble actually modelling Elon here, he’s clearly made noises gesturing towards existential risk from AI (the famous reference to demon summoning), he’s spoken with Eliezer on multiple occasions, and he’s clearly worried about the risks… but then he’ll mention how woke GPT is as if that problem is more than a rounding error at the 12th decimal place compared to the existential stuff. WTF is he thinking?! Is he just way dumber than I expected from his accomplishments?
He’s bipolar.
The accelerationist and the doomer souls living in one body apparently.
X is Musk’s longstanding dream of an “everything app”. Perhaps the idea is to have a language model as the front end, and Twitter as the foundation.
As for “WTF is he thinking”, he’s tried out different strategies. He called for regulation, he started Neuralink, he cofounded OpenAI, he denounced woke AI, he called for a moratorium.
The LLM race is continuing regardless; he’s never said AI is guaranteed doom, just that it’s dangerous; and he has never shied from trying to solve problems himself. So it looks like he’s decided to remain relevant by making Twitter (via X) a player in the LLM race, alongside Google (Anthropic), Microsoft (OpenAI), and Meta/Facebook (Meta AI).
This confuses me too. I think Musk must be either smarter or a lot dumber than I thought he was yesterday, and sadly, dumber seems to be the way it usually goes.
That said, if this makes OpenAI go away to be replaced by a company run by someone who respects the dangers of AI, I’ll take it.
See also: If Elon Musk does something as a result of his AI angst by 2025, will Eliezer Yudkowsky judge it to be a positive or neutral initiative (as opposed to negative)?, currently at 21%.
I don’t know what to think.
But if I had Elon money, and I was worried and informed in the way I observe him to be, I would be doing a lot of things.
However I would also not talk about those things at all, for a number of reasons.
Given that, would I be doing something like this as a smoke screen? Maybe?
What happened to the AI armistice?
What about it? With only 10k GPUs, it’d be physically impossible, by quite a lot, for him to train something >GPT-4 within the moratorium.