Elon Musk's AI company to reveal 'current best' AI hours after Rishi Sunak summit interview - what will it be?

Just hours after calling the technology “one of the biggest threats” to the modern world, Elon Musk has announced that his own AI will soon be rolled out to select users. And, according to him, it will be "the best that currently exists".

Announcing the news on his own X (formerly Twitter) platform, Musk said the AI developed by his xAI company would outpace others in "some important respects". A day earlier, the outspoken billionaire had visited the first AI Safety Summit, seen as a major endorsement of the UK Government's aims on AI security.

Whilst there, he said “we have for the first time the situation where we have something that is going to be far smarter than the smartest human”. He said the summit was “timely” given the nature of the threat of AI, and suggested a “third-party referee” in the sector to oversee the work of AI companies. But what do we know about Musk's upcoming AI?

What is xAI?

Musk's xAI company was only officially unveiled earlier this year in July, aimed at competing with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and armed with a mission "to understand the true nature of the universe”. The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX assembled a team of renowned AI researchers who previously held positions at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla.

Among the team members are Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer for Google's DeepMind; Tony Wu, who also has experience at Google; Christian Szegedy, a former Google research scientist; and Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoft.

What could Musk's AI look like?

Despite being a co-founder and former financial supporter of OpenAI - Musk parted ways with the renowned research lab in 2018 - he has become more critical of the company as it garnered worldwide recognition and achieved commercial success through the launch of ChatGPT last year.

During a Twitter Spaces event held on 12 July, Musk elaborated on his strategy for developing a "safer" AI. Instead of directly coding morality into AI, Musk stated that xAI aims to construct a highly inquisitive AI, fostering a "maximally curious" approach to learning and understanding.

And in April, Musk announced his intention to introduce an AI called "TruthGPT", which would aim to compete with Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI. During a Fox News conversation with Tucker Carlson around the same time, Musk expressed his concerns about what he described as ChatGPT's liberal bias, and outlined his intention to develop an alternative that would embody a “maximum truth-seeking AI."