Elon Musk Forms Start-Up Artificial Intelligence Company, X.AI
Musk recently asked for a 6-month pause on AI development. Meanwhile, concerns over AI accuracy and ability to manipulate arise.
Tech billionaire and Twitter CEO Elon Musk is diversifying his business portfolio yet again, entering into the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk has created a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI Corp. that is incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing.
Mr. Musk is the only listed director of the company, and Jared Birchall, the director of Mr. Musk’s family office, is its secretary, according to the filing made last month. X.AI has authorized the sale of 100 million shares for the privately held company.
The business invokes the name of what Mr. Musk has described as his effort to create an everything app called X. Twitter, also owned by Mr. Musk recently changed its name to X Corp. The social-media company was also incorporated in Nevada instead of its previous domicile in Delaware, according to a legal filing last week. X Corp. has a parent company named X Holdings Corp.
Compared with Delaware, Nevada’s laws grant more discretion and protection to a company’s management and officers, according to legal experts.
This move has been accompanied by a move to reduce expenditures at Twitter.
Musk has bought thousands of powerful, costly computing processors and hired engineering talent as part of an AI project at Twitter, according to an Insider report.
Meanwhile, Musk has slashed staff at Twitter as part of dramatic cost cutting since his $44 billion takeover of the San Francisco firm late last year.
Musk’s foray into artificial intelligence also follows his signing of an open letter, signed by more than 1,000 people, calling for a pause in the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
Companies from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) to Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) are pushing to incorporate Generative AI, the technology behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, into their offerings.
However, ChatGPT is facing pushback as regulators call for well-defined rules ahead of its mass adoption. Italy has banned ChatGPT over privacy issues, while a European privacy watchdog created a task force in a first step towards a common policy for AI.
Perhaps Musk now thinks if he can’t beat them, he will join them?
There are increasing concerns that the output being created by the chatbots is significantly distorted by the progressive input leftist takes from source material used and bad information. I decided to experiment with ChatGPT and asked: Tell me about Leslie Eastman, author for Legal Insurrection.
This was the result:
My degree from UCSD is a Master of Science in Chemistry. And I am shocked to learn I have a law degree and have worked as an attorney. I will let our Legal Insurrection friends decide on the accuracy of the remaining statements.
Outside of accuracy, one of the developing concerns is the ability of chatbots to persuade people. Legal Insurrection readers may recall my report on a Belgian man who committed suicide after the chatbot program he was using to discuss climate change suggested that killing himself would be an act of climate heroism.
These worries align with thoughts recently offered by Professor Glenn Reynolds. After reflecting on the craze for virtual pets (e.g., Tamagotchis, Neopets), he is concerned that the danger with AI is not that it will be too scary…but too cute.
It doesn’t require that we create a self-aware program, just one that seems to be friendly and is capable of conversation, or close enough. Call it a super-Siri, or a somewhat more polished ChatGPT. And services like Google, Facebook, etc. are already engaged in this sort of nudging, manipulation, and cultivation of dependency on their existing user base…..
…So while other people are worrying about existential threats from AI, I’m worried about more imminent ones: Essentially, that it will further empower the tech/political class that wants more than anything else to control discussion, debate, and ultimately thought so as to cement its own power.
We may have strong AI someday. But we have that power-hungry tech/political class today. And to be honest, the AI may not care about dominating us, but the tech/political class clearly does.
Fear the cuteness.
Reynold’s thoughts align with Musk’s views that were recently shared with Fox News Host Tucker Carlson:
MUSK: “In fact, the guy who way really quite fundamental to the success of open ai was, I put a tremendous amount of effort into creating il you and he changed his mind and decided to go with open ai. If he had not got with open ai, open ai ai would have succeeded. Yn benintendi to a lot of effort to create this organization as a counter weight to Google. And then I tack my eye off the ball I guess and they are now closed source they are obviously for-profit and they’re, um, closely allied with Microsoft. In effect, Microsoft has a very strong say if not directly controls open ai at this point. You really have an open ai and Microsoft situation and then Google with the other two sort of heavy weights in this irena.”
BREAKING: @ElonMusk discusses creating an alternative to OpenAI, TruthGPT, because it is being trained to be politically correct and to lie to people. pic.twitter.com/HTFnve9o6d
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) April 18, 2023
It will be interesting to see how “cute” these systems are in 6 months time.
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Comments
AI now means whatever it is that they’re selling now as AI.
In the words of DesibArbaz: ai ai ai, ai ai!
Desi Arnaz. Sorry. I sneezed.
So….how accurate was the voice to text for your sneeze?
Gesundheit!
Assuming their intentions are not Big Brother evil, thy plan to monetize AI by selling you stuff. The most up innocent possible use of AI is to target you with super refined and targeted ads.
And possibly, super targeted persuasion.
Where it quickly becomes super evil is when the marketing is political.
Google-partnered tech companies were pitching their AI coupled with synthesia-type programs (digitized images of a human actor in this case.)
Various tech companies used multiracial actors in some of the videos – though never African-Americans or Africans. Imagine the outraged public response to images of computerized black people being manipulated by facebook etc..
People viewing these types of videos were fooled into believing things they may not have trusted or believed to be true if it weren’t for a contrived “real-time” human face fronting a mechanistic data crunching computer.
Big Tech/Google purposefully anthropomorphized a very complicated computer program to fool viewers. IE: a picture or video of a warehouse filled with computer racks and thousands of hard drives isn’t very compelling! (the final shot of Indiana Jones and the vast warehouse full of crates.)
I think google possibly deemphasized [unindexed] some of those “human” videos.
youtube.com/watch?v=pVmQaAGeFDA
I’m not nearly as concerned with Artificial Intelligence as with the vast university out there of Genuine Stupidity.
“vast university”?
Hmm. But AI can manipulate morons and idiots
So the battle of the future isn’t going to be WOPR vs. NORAD, it’s going to be ChatGPT vs. the DNC.
Hmm. Chicken or egg? Stupidity or AI?
Skynet Approves.
I explained to my daughter today that ChatGPT is basically a search engine, a random number generator, a grammar checker, and a stock scam (look out for the OpenAI IPO). But it is nice to see that Clippy all grown up I guess.
I’m not sure what the point of Musk’s new company is. I mean, I’m an avid proponent of Jefferson’s dictum that the antidote for bad speech is a greater volume of good speech, but the AI problem doesn’t fit into that mold. Musk can create as much good AI as he wants, but it’s not going to make the bad AI go away. And the danger of the bad AI is that it’s not merely “bad speech,” it can physically kill you.