xAI: An AI Startup of Elon Musk for Understanding The Universe

• 1 xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup company, is all-set to surprise the world with its innovative developments.
• 2 With 10+ team members, Elon Musk’s xAI will soon share more development stories.

Mid-April 2023, Elon Musk, the Billionaire entrepreneur, revealed his new artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI. The Wall Street Journal, an American business and economic-focused international daily newspaper, was the first to report about this new AI startup of Musk.

xAI: Elon Musk’s AI Startup

xAI, an AI startup, was officially announced on July 12, 2023, Wednesday, by Elon Musk. The aim of the company is “to develop a generative AI program with established offerings like ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI in November 2022. This AI startup is backed with a team of over ten members, which include Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, and Christian Szegedy.

Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023

With strong research power in their field, these people have already been an important part of some of the well-known projects. OpenAI, DeepMind, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, Twitter, and University of Toronto, are the previous companies and projects of xAI team members.

xAI Team Members

As the AI startup is established with a goal to understand the true nature of the “universe,” it definitely needs strong team players. With the help of them, the goal of Musk’s AI startup would take its first step into the progressive direction. Although, there is more “official information” yet to be revealed and that is expected to go public in the coming weeks or months.

xAI has added its team members’ names on its official website, which are the following:

• Elon Musk – The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX

• Igor Babuschkin – Ex-Research Engineer at DeepMind and OpenAI

• Manuel Kroiss –  Ex-Software Engineer at DeepMind and Google

• Yuhuai (Tony) Wu – Ex-Research Scientist at Google, A Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford University

• Christian Szegedy – An Experienced Ex-Engineer and Research Scientist at Google

• Jimmy Ba – An Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto

• Toby Pohlen – Ex-Research Engineer at Google

• Ross Nordeen – Ex-Technical Program Manager at Tesla’s supercomputing and machine learning division

• Kyle Kosic – Ex-Engineer at OpenAI

• Greg Yang – Ex-Researcher at Microsoft Research

• Guodong Zhang – Ex-Research Scientist at DeepMind

• Zihang Dai – Ex-Research Scientist at Google

• Dan Hendrycks – xAI’s Team Advisor

Some Methods Followed by xAI Team

The xAI team has collectively worked on some of the most widely used methods in the AI field, which are:

• Adam Optimizer

• Batch Normalization

• Layer Normalization

• The Discovery of “Adversarial Example”

By following these methods, xAI has also brought in innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer – XL, Autoformalization, Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling and µ Transfer. Furthermore, its other development breakthroughs are:

• AlphaStar

• Alphacode

• Inception

• Minerva

• GPT – 3.5

• GPT – 4

Notably, xAI is a “separate company from X Corp.,” which is an American technology company established by Elon Musk, this year as the successor to Twitter Inc. Furthermore, X Corp. will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies, as the AI startup mentioned in its official site.

On July 15, 2023, Elon Musk held a Twitter Space and discussed xAI, and to  which he talked about the goals of xAI and its future plans.

Great summary https://t.co/s2QE9zuzp4

— xAI (@xai) July 15, 2023