Elon Musk has announced his new company, xAI, which he says aims to understand the true nature of the universe.
Yap Aryan | Norphoto | Getty Images
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Friday that he plans for his newest venture, artificial intelligence startup xAI, to collaborate with the automaker on a “silicon interface” and an “AI software interface.”
Musk also said, during Friday’s live audio session on Twitter Spaces, that xAI will use Twitter’s data to train the “extremely curious” AI systems and products he hopes to build there. Musk did not specify if and how much Twitter will charge xAI or its other companies for its data.
When Musk led the purchase of the social media venture in October 2022, Twitter took out $13 billion in new debt. The company has struggled to increase subscription revenue, and former employees and suppliers have sued for non-payment for work completed or for termination of service.
Several other companies of which Musk was the founder or CEO, including Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Co. , have been doing business together for years. Some of their dealings were disclosed in Tesla’s financial filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
On Friday, without citing evidence, Musk alleged that “every AI organization on Earth” used Twitter data for training, “in all cases illegally.” It was not clear what laws would have been broken by scraping other people’s data. Earlier this month, Twitter sued four unidentified data-disclosure parties in Texas.
Twitter implemented pricing restrictions on the social media platform in recent weeks because, Musk claimed, it was “crazy scraped.” He said, “We had multiple entities take down every tweet ever, trying to do it at the same time, basically over a period of days. So – this was bringing the system to its knees. So we had to take action.” I apologize for the inconvenience with rate setting.
In light of the widespread use of Twitter data by AI software developers, Musk said, “I think we’ll use public tweets — obviously nothing private — for training as well, just like everyone else.”
Musk said the Twitter dataset calls for “text training” and “image and video training.” However, he determined that AI systems needed more than human-generated data, and he hoped that xAI would follow in the footsteps of Alphabet’s Alpha Zero, a computer program that had achieved an adept level of play in three games, chess, shogi and go after training by playing these. Matches against themselves.
Omar Qazi (known as Catalog Collector Mars on Twitter), a Tesla fan and promoter, asked Musk some questions about how he plans for xAI to work with Tesla during the Spaces event. Among other things, he questioned whether xAI was likely to use silicon made by Nvidia or Tesla to process data.
Musk said, “That’s kind of a Tesla question. Tesla is building custom silicon. I wouldn’t call anything Tesla produces ‘GPU’ although one could characterize them in GPU equivalents.” Then he talked about Tesla’s in-car hardware, which enables the company’s advanced driver assistance systems to work in its cars. The systems are marketed as full autopilot and self-driving capabilities in the United States.
Tesla has been promising its fans a robotax, or self-driving vehicle, for years. At the time, Musk said a cross-country demo with a Tesla car would be possible without a single human intervention by the end of 2017. In 2019, Tesla raised billions of dollars with a promise of 1 million robot-ready Teslas on the road in a year. So far, no Tesla car can operate without a human driver ready to steer or brake at any time.
Musk said on Twitter Spaces on Friday that the Tesla 4 devices, which are now shipping, are “three to five times more powerful than the Device 3,” promising that the “Device 5” will be coming in a few years and will be “four or five times more powerful” than his version. current.
The CEO also discussed Dojo, a supercomputer that Tesla is developing for the purposes of machine learning for artificial intelligence and computer vision training. Tesla uses video and data from its customers’ cars to improve existing software or develop new features.
Musk said that the final AI language model xAI would develop would not be “politically correct”. “I think our AI can provide answers that people may find controversial even though they are actually correct,” said the CEO, who has repeatedly attacked “wake-up” or progressive values.
The Tesla CEO has said that xAI will need to develop technology that “understands the physical world, not just the Internet,” and believes Tesla’s driving data will help it on that front.
Walter Isaacson, author of a biography of Elon Musk released later this year, asked Musk about Optimus, a humanoid robot that Tesla was developing with the intention of using it in manufacturing. Musk said the bot is still in its “early stages” and that his team needs to find a way for users to easily turn it off.
Tesla showcased a design for a humanoid robot called Optimus at Artificial Intelligence Day in September 2022. The Tesla CEO is expected to share updates on this and more on an earnings call next Wednesday.
– CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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