Musk launches xAI with people drawn from the major labs

Elon Musk announced the formation of xAI. The company had been incorporated in Nevada on 9 March; this was the public announcement. Its stated goal was "to understand the true nature of the universe," and on Twitter Musk put it as forming xAI "to understand reality." The eleven researchers he had assembled came from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and Tesla. Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI and had left its board in 2018. Three months earlier he had signed the open letter calling for a six-month pause on giant AI experiments, and his moving to the building side of that argument was received with some surprise. Musk has argued that an AI that wants to understand humanity is less likely to destroy it.