XAI (company)

Last updated

X.AI Corp.
xAI
Company type Private
Industry Artificial intelligence
FoundedMarch 9, 2023;20 months ago (2023-03-09) [a]
Founder Elon Musk
Headquarters
San Francisco Bay Area, California, U.S.
Key people
Products Grok, PromptIDE [2]
Number of employees
c. 100 (2024) [3]
Website x.ai

X.AI Corp., [4] [5] doing business as xAI, is an American startup company working in the area of artificial intelligence (AI). Founded by Elon Musk in March 2023, its stated goal is "to understand the true nature of the universe". [6]

Contents

History

xAI was founded by Musk [7] [8] [9] in Nevada [4] on March 9, 2023, and has since been headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. [10] Igor Babuschkin, formerly associated with Google's DeepMind unit, was recruited by Musk to be Chief Engineer. [11]

Musk officially announced the formation of xAI on July 12, 2023. [12] [13] He linked the date (7 + 12 + 23 = 42) to the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, [14] in which a supercomputer calculates that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42; and to the company's mission "to understand the universe". [15] [6]

In December 2023, in a U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, xAI revealed that it had raised US$134.7 million in outside funding out of a total of up to $1 billion. [16] [17] Despite the filing, Musk later claimed via X that xAI was not seeking any funding. [18]

In May 2024, xAI was reported to be looking for $6 billion of funding. [19] Later that same month, the company secured the support of various venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Tribe Capital. [20] [21]

In May 2024, Musk predicted that AI will make most jobs obsolete, requiring a high universal income. [22]

In June 2024, the Greater Memphis Chamber announced xAI is planning on building the world's largest supercomputer in Memphis, TN. [23] The supercomputer is planned to be the most advanced AI model when it becomes fully operational in December 2024. Local government in Memphis has voiced concerns regarding the increased usage of electricity, 150 megawatts of power at peak, and while the agreement with the city is being worked out, the company has deployed 14 VoltaGrid gas generators to temporarily enhance the power supply. [24] Environmental advocates claim that the gas-burning turbines emit large quantities of gases causing air pollution, and that xAI has been operating the turbines illegally without the necessary permits. [25] [26]

As of August 2024, Musk diverted a large number of Nvidia chips which had been ordered by Tesla, Inc. to X and xAI. [27]

Products

While xAI's stated goal is "to understand the true nature of the universe", one of its immediate objectives is to create an AI that is capable of advanced mathematical reasoning, something not found in current models. [28]

On November 4, 2023, xAI unveiled Grok, an AI chatbot that is integrated with X. xAI stated that when the bot is out of beta, it will only be available to X's Premium+ subscribers. [29] [30]

On November 6, 2023, xAI released PromptIDE, an integrated development environment designed for prompt engineering and interpretability research, offering tools like a Python code editor and rich analytics to empower users in exploring and refining prompts for large language models like Grok-1. [31] [32] [33]

On March 2024, Grok was made available to all X Premium subscribers; it was previously available only to Premium+ subscribers. [34] [35]

On March 17, 2024, xAI released Grok-1 as open source. [36] [37]

On March 29, 2024, Grok-1.5 was announced, with "improved reasoning capabilities" and a context length of 128,000 tokens. [38]

On April 12, 2024, Grok-1.5 Vision (Grok-1.5V) was announced. Grok-1.5V is able to process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, graphs, screenshots, and photographs. [39] [40]

On August 14, 2024, Grok-2 was made available to X Premium subscribers. [41] It is the first Grok model with image generation capabilities. [42]

On October 21, 2024, xAI released an API. [43]

Notes

  1. ↑ The company was incorporated on this date. It was not officially announced until July 12, 2023.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SpaceX</span> American private spacecraft company

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an American space technology company. Since its founding in 2001, the company has made numerous advancements in rocket propulsion, reusable launch vehicle, human spaceflight and satellite constellation technology. By the late 2010s, SpaceX had become the world's dominant space launch provider, its launch cadence rivaling that of the Chinese space program and eclipsing all those of its private competitors. SpaceX, NASA and the United States Armed Forces work closely together by means of governmental contracts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elon Musk</span> South African-born businessman (born 1971)

Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. Other involvements include ownership of X Corp., the company that operates the social media platform X, and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. In November 2024, president-elect Donald Trump announced Musk is set to become co-chair of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the second Trump administration. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of November 2024 Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$304 billion.

The history of Twitter, later known as X, can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neuralink</span> American neurotechnology company

Neuralink Corp. is an American neurotechnology company that has developed, as of 2024, implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). It was founded by Elon Musk and a team of seven scientists and engineers. Neuralink was launched in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017. The company is based in Fremont, California with plans to build a three-story building with office and manufacturing space near Austin, Texas in Del Valle, located about 10 miles east of Tesla's headquarters and manufacturing plant that opened in 2022.

Elon Musk is the CEO or owner of multiple companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp, and has expressed many views on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from politics to science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Optimus (robot)</span> Humanoid robot being developed by Tesla

Optimus, also known as Tesla Bot, is a general-purpose robotic humanoid under development by Tesla, Inc. It was announced at the company's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Day event on August 19, 2021, and a prototype was shown in 2022. CEO Elon Musk stated in 2022 that he thinks Optimus "has the potential to be more significant than [Tesla's] vehicle business over time." Media and expert opinions based on corporate showcases have been mixed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sriram Krishnan</span> Indian-American investor

Sriram Krishnan is an Indian-American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. He is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lex Fridman</span> Russian-American scientist and podcast host (born 1983)

Lex Fridman is a Russian-American computer scientist and podcaster. Since 2018 he has hosted the Lex Fridman Podcast, where he interviews notable figures from various fields such as science, technology, sports, and politics.

The business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech, framing the acquisition as the cornerstone of X, an "everything app".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Starlink in the Russo-Ukrainian War</span> Co-operation between Ukraine and Starlink

In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested American aerospace company SpaceX to activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war. Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military. The satellite service has served for humanitarian purposes, as well as defense and attacks on Russian positions.

Character.ai is a neural language model chatbot service that can generate human-like text responses and participate in contextual conversation. Constructed by previous developers of Google's LaMDA, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, the beta model was made available to use by the public in September 2022. The beta model has since been retired on September 24, 2024, and can no longer be used.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ChatGPT</span> Chatbot developed by OpenAI

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in 2022. It is based on the GPT-4o large language model (LLM). ChatGPT can generate human-like conversational responses, and enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid investment in and public attention to the field of artificial intelligence. Some observers have raised concern about the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation.

Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022; Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. In a move that, despite Yaccarino's accession, was widely attributed to Musk, Twitter was rebranded to X on July 23, 2023, and its domain name changed from twitter.com to x.com on May 17, 2024.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model created by OpenAI, and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. It was launched on March 14, 2023, and made publicly available via the paid chatbot product ChatGPT Plus, via OpenAI's API, and via the free chatbot Microsoft Copilot. As a transformer-based model, GPT-4 uses a paradigm where pre-training using both public data and "data licensed from third-party providers" is used to predict the next token. After this step, the model was then fine-tuned with reinforcement learning feedback from humans and AI for human alignment and policy compliance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gemini (chatbot)</span> Chatbot developed by Google

Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google. Based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name, it was launched in 2023 after being developed as a direct response to the rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It was previously based on PaLM, and initially the LaMDA family of large language models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">X Corp.</span> American technology company

X Corp. is an American technology company headquartered in Bastrop, Texas. Established by Elon Musk in 2023 as the successor to Twitter, Inc., it is a wholly owned subsidiary of X Holdings Corp., which is itself mostly owned by Musk. The company owns the social networking service X, and has announced plans to use it as a base for other offerings. While the official name of the company and social network is now X, many users and media outlets continue to refer to it as Twitter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Effective accelerationism</span> Philosophical and social movement

Effective accelerationism, often abbreviated as "e/acc", is a 21st-century philosophical movement that advocates for an explicitly pro-technology stance. Its proponents believe that unrestricted technological progress is a solution to universal human problems like poverty, war and climate change. They see themselves as a counterweight to more cautious views on technological innovation, often giving their opponents the derogatory labels of "doomers" or "decels".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grok (chatbot)</span> Chatbot developed by xAI

Grok is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI. Based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name, it was launched in 2023 as an initiative by Elon Musk. The chatbot is advertised as having a "sense of humor" and direct access to X. It is currently under beta testing and is available with X Premium.

References

  1. 1 2 Beltran, Luisa (November 20, 2023). "xAI org chart: All the top power players at Elon Musk's new OpenAI competitor" . Fortune . Archived from the original on November 20, 2023.
  2. ↑ "PromptIDE". x.ai. Archived from the original on November 15, 2023. Retrieved November 11, 2023.
  3. ↑ Mathews, Jessica (June 28, 2024). "One of the original employees at Elon Musk's xAI has left and returned to OpenAI". Fortune. Archived from the original on June 28, 2024.
  4. 1 2 "X.AI Corp". OpenCorporates . Archived from the original on August 5, 2023. Retrieved July 27, 2023.
  5. ↑ "Privacy policy". x.ai. Archived from the original on November 19, 2023. Retrieved November 7, 2023.
  6. 1 2 "xAI: Understand the Universe". x.ai. Archived from the original on August 3, 2023. Retrieved August 3, 2023.
  7. ↑ "Elon Musk launches xAI in challenge to dominance of ChatGPT owner". The Financial Times . July 12, 2023. Archived from the original on July 12, 2023. Retrieved July 12, 2023.
  8. ↑ Bhattacharya, Suryathapa (July 12, 2023). "Elon Musk Launches xAI, His New Artificial-Intelligence Company". The Wall Street Journal . Archived from the original on July 12, 2023. Retrieved July 12, 2023.
  9. ↑ Markman, Jon. "Elon Musk Unveils X.ai: A Game-Changer For Investors". Forbes. Archived from the original on October 18, 2023. Retrieved October 24, 2023.
  10. ↑ Anirban Ghoshal (July 13, 2023). "Elon Musk launches xAI to take on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI". Computer World. Archived from the original on July 18, 2023. Retrieved July 14, 2023.
  11. ↑ Isaacson, Walter (September 12, 2023). Elon Musk. Simon & Schuster. pp. 605–606. ISBN   978-1-9821-8128-4. Archived from the original on November 26, 2023. Retrieved November 28, 2023.
  12. ↑ Vynck, Gerrit De (July 15, 2023). "Musk's new AI company, xAI, will aim to solve scientific mysteries". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286. Archived from the original on July 17, 2023. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
  13. ↑ Mark, Charles. "Openaiinsiders" . Retrieved November 29, 2023.
  14. ↑ Gairola, Ananya. "How Elon Musk's xAI Launch Date Pays Tribute To Douglas Adam's 'Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy'". Benzinga. Archived from the original on September 23, 2023. Retrieved September 9, 2023.
  15. ↑ Musk, Elon [@elonmusk] (July 12, 2023). "And what are the most fundamental unknown questions?" (Tweet). Archived from the original on August 6, 2023. Retrieved September 1, 2023– via Twitter.
  16. ↑ Silberling, Amanda. "Elon Musk is looking to raise $1 billion for xAI". Archived from the original on December 6, 2023. Retrieved December 6, 2023.
  17. ↑ Primack, Dan (December 6, 2023). "How Elon Musk may be spinning up a Plan B to save X". axios.com. Retrieved September 6, 2024.
  18. ↑ "Elon Musk says his AI firm xAI is not raising funds 'right now'". reuters.com. December 6, 2023. Retrieved September 6, 2024.
  19. ↑ "Elon's AI venture being sold as part of a "Muskonomy"". Axios. May 18, 2024.
  20. ↑ "Elon Musk's xAI secures new backing from Andreessen, Lightspeed, Sequoia and Tribe". Financial Times. Retrieved May 24, 2024.
  21. ↑ "Musk's xAI seeking to raise $6 bln in Andreessen Horowitz-backed funding, FT reports". Reuters. May 23, 2024.
  22. ↑ Tomchak, David (May 30, 2024). "Elon Musk: Tesla CEO warns of the risks of AI to our jobs—while raising $6bn for xAI". Archived from the original on May 30, 2024. Retrieved May 30, 2024.
  23. ↑ "Musk to Locate xAI Supercomputer in Memphis". MemphisFlyer. Retrieved June 6, 2024.
  24. ↑ Edwards, Benj (July 24, 2024). "Elon Musk claims he is training "the world's most powerful AI by every metric"". Ars Technica. Retrieved July 25, 2024.
  25. ↑ "Musk's xAI operating gas turbines without permits at data center, environmental group says". Reuters. August 28, 2024.
  26. ↑ "Environmentalists urge health department to take action on xAI". Memphis Local, Sports, Business & Food News | Daily Memphian. Retrieved September 10, 2024.
  27. ↑ Kolodny, Lora. "Elon Musk ordered Nvidia to ship thousands of AI chips reserved for Tesla to X and xAI". cnbc.com. CNBC. Retrieved August 10, 2024.
  28. ↑ Schreckinger, Ben (July 17, 2023). "Elon Musk's liberal-trolling AI plan has a core audience". Politico . Archived from the original on October 11, 2023. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  29. ↑ Neowin, Paul Hill (November 4, 2023). "Elon Musk gives a glimpse at xAI's Grok chatbot". Neowin. Archived from the original on November 4, 2023. Retrieved November 4, 2023.
  30. ↑ "Elon Musk Says His New AI Bot 'Grok' Will Have Sarcasm and Access to X Information". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on November 4, 2023. Retrieved November 4, 2023.
  31. ↑ "Announcing PromptIDE". x.ai. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  32. ↑ "xAI Launches PromptIDE for Advanced AI Prompt Engineering with Grok". Maginative. November 7, 2023. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  33. ↑ Razzaq, Asif (November 6, 2023). "xAI Launches PromptIDE: A New Frontier in Prompt Engineering and Artificial Intelligence AI Transparency". MarkTechPost. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  34. ↑ "Elon Musk Makes Grok AI Available to All Paying X Subscribers: What to Know". CNET. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  35. ↑ Mehta, Ivan (April 6, 2024). "X makes Grok chatbot available to premium subscribers". TechCrunch. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  36. ↑ "Elon Musk's Grok-1 goes open-source: What it means for users". The Times of India. ISSN   0971-8257 . Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  37. ↑ David, Emilia (March 18, 2024). "xAI open sources Grok". The Verge. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  38. ↑ "Announcing Grok-1.5". x.ai. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  39. ↑ "Grok-1.5 Vision Preview". x.ai. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  40. ↑ "Grok-1.5 Vision: First Multimodal Model from Elon Musk's xAI". encord.com. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  41. ↑ Mehta, Ivan (August 14, 2024). "xAI releases Grok-2, adds image generation on X". TechCrunch. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  42. ↑ Weatherbed, Jess (August 14, 2024). "xAI's new Grok-2 chatbots bring AI image generation to X". The Verge. Retrieved August 20, 2024.
  43. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (October 21, 2024). "xAI, Elon Musk's AI startup, launches an API". TechCrunch. Retrieved November 3, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.