Elon Musk says his xAI startup is ‘definitely in competition’ with OpenAI—which he cofounded

Elon Musk has a hot-and-cold relationship with artificial intelligence. Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Elon Musk’s new startup is “definitely competing” with OpenAI, the billionaire said Friday in a Twitter Spaces discussion. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is his latest salvo against OpenAI, currently the busiest and best-funded player in the fast-growing industry.

During the discussion, Musk and staff at his new startup spoke at length about xAI’s mission. Although it doesn’t have any products yet, the startup opened a new website this week, and it aims to safely develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

The plan is to “build a good AGI with the overall goal of just trying to understand the universe,” Musk said. Later, he added, “I think you could rephrase xAI’s mission statement as: ‘What’s really going on?’ That is our goal.”

The concept of AGI, technology that can understand or learn human tasks, excites and terrifies scientists – even if it’s only theoretical. On Friday, Musk’s new hires were very tech-savvy. Greg Yang, a former engineer at Microsoft Corp., compared the current state of AI development to the invention of quantum physics and general relativity.

At times during the conversation, some of Musk’s statements bordered on the outlandish. “Why isn’t there much evidence of aliens?” he asked at one point.

Musk has a notoriously hot-and-cold relationship with artificial intelligence. In 2015, he founded OpenAI, then a few years later left its board, and criticized the company. In March, the billionaire added his name to a call for a six-month freeze on some AI development — then less than six months later, he officially launched xAI.

The 12 first employees of xAI, including Musk, are all men and all have industrial backgrounds. Most previously worked at Google and DeepMind at Alphabet Inc. in some capacity.

One industry concern is the relative concentration of AI research. One xAI staff member — Kyle Kosic, formerly of OpenAI — says he expects a lot of competition in the field. “The reason I’m so excited about xAI is that I think the biggest risk with AI is monopolization by a couple of entities,” Kosic said.