Elon Musk officially incorporates X.AI to take on OpenAI

Just weeks after signing an open letter warning the world that giant AI models pose catastrophic risks, Elon Musk has quietly incorporated an AI startup of his own.

State filing records in Nevada revealed that Musk founded a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI on March 9th. Musk is listed as the sole director, with Jared Birchall, the head of his family office, serving as company secretary.

Hoarding GPUs and hitting up familiar investors

Rumors about Musk's AI ambitions had been swirling for days before the official paperwork surfaced.

Business Insider recently reported that Musk purchased thousands of high-end GPUs to power an upcoming generative AI product. Soon after, the Financial Times reported that Musk was planning an AI firm specifically designed to challenge the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, even approaching existing investors in SpaceX and Tesla to raise seed funding.

Musk tried playing dumb just days ago. When asked about his massive GPU shopping spree during an appearance on Twitter Spaces, he brushed off any corporate plans, casually quipping that "it seems like everyone and their dog is buying GPUs at this point."

The "everything app" and an old grudge

The X.AI branding neatly fits Musk's ongoing corporate shuffle. He recently folded Twitter under the corporate parent name X Corp., part of his long-stated dream to build a WeChat-style "everything app" under the X moniker.

The real fuel here is Musk's messy history with OpenAI. Musk co-founded the outfit in 2015 alongside Sam Altman but walked away in 2018 after losing an internal power struggle. With ChatGPT and GPT-4 turning OpenAI into the hottest name in tech and supercharging Microsoft and Google's AI push, Musk has grown increasingly hostile, blasting OpenAI for straying from its open-source roots.

Why it matters

Musk's moves make strategic sense, but the optics are fascinating. Urging the entire industry to hit the pause button on frontier model training while simultaneously hoarding thousands of GPUs and founding a shell company looks a lot like buying time to play catch-up.

For users and developers, there is nothing to test today. But Musk owns something rare: Twitter's real-time conversational firehose and Tesla's engineering talent. If he can leverage that proprietary live data to train foundation models, X.AI could eventually ship models with far better real-time world knowledge than current iterations of ChatGPT.

Still, building frontier AI from scratch in 2023 is a punishing game. A few thousand GPUs might sound like a massive hoard, but it is just table stakes compared to the vast compute clusters deployed by Microsoft, Google, and Meta. Poaching elite AI researchers in an overheated talent war while juggling Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX will test whether Musk's brute-force playbook can work in generative AI.