Anyone who has observed billionaire Elon Musk’s erratic and often contradictory behavior in recent years might believe that he has lost his sense of direction. But this chaotic management and his petty personal matters don’t quite fit the story that famed journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson told in a recent profile of Musk in Time Magazine. According to the news, Musk’s apparent missteps on Twitter and Tesla in recent years are actually short-term setbacks to his master plan.
Artificial intelligence, in one form or another, is already a critical component in the products of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink (Musk’s brain-computer interface company) and other projects. Although these companies mostly operate independently of each other, according to Time’s report, Musk plans to connect them all with his newly founded xAI initiative, with the aim of creating a powerful and general artificial intelligence. The news claims that by combining text data from Twitter users and images captured by Tesla’s Full Autonomous Driving system, Musk may try to develop both ChatGPT-style artificial intelligence chatbots and physical robots that can navigate the real world.
Musk says he’s noticed lately that he’s been spending a lot of his time late at night engaging in Twitter antics, Musk said during an interview with Isaacson. Musk says he spent time thinking about what science fiction writers call the “singularity,” a not-too-distant future in which intelligent machines could make humans obsolete, and realized he “couldn’t just sit there and do nothing.”
Regarding the singularity, Musk says, “This may happen sooner than we expect.”
This is how the road to xAI began
This fear reportedly led Musk to launch xAI. Musk’s new venture, which he claims focuses on “AI security,” has hired top talent in the field, such as former Deepmind research engineer Igor Babuschkin. According to Time’s report, in the near term, Musk instructed xAI researchers to develop an artificial intelligence that can generate computer code and a “politically neutral” chatbot to rival ChatGPT. Longer term, xAI’s website states that its goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe.” Musk previously worked on artificial intelligence security at OpenAI, but severed ties with the company after the investment he received from Microsoft.
Isaacson’s past subjects include Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci. Isaacson called Musk “the most interesting person today” in an interview with technology journalist Kara Swisher earlier this year.
Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter last year was described by his critics as a financial failure and earned him the Guinness World Record for the largest loss of personal wealth in history. But hidden in all this chaos, Isaacson points out, is actually a gold mine of Twitter user data that could potentially serve as fuel for training a powerful AI system.
Twitter’s data corpus of more than a trillion tweets, which Isaacson calls “the collective mind of humanity,” could give Musk a fighting chance against the massive data sets held by rivals such as OpenAI and Google. Musk admits that he only realized the value of Twitter’s AI data after purchasing the site.
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