Elon Musk has been teasing plans for his own AI company for some time, suggesting in late February that the world needs a “based” alternative to the “woke” tools developed by the likes of OpenAI. Now, that company has officially launched. Finally, we’ll have artificial intelligence that gives right-wing figures like Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump the respect they deserve!

Named xAI, Musk’s new startup will be led by the billionaire himself, who made the announcement via Twitter. (If you want to find the tweet yourself, it’s just above the one promoting a two-and-a-half-hour interview with the misogynist influencer and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate.) Engineers with experience at competing tech firms such as Google and Microsoft are also on board, including DeepMind’s Igor Babuschkin. Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, will act as an advisor.

We can take some solace in the fact that Musk has been a prominent voice in the AI safety conversation over the years. In fact, that’s why he resigned from the OpenAI board in 2018, having repeatedly warned about AI’s existential threat. This March, he also signed the open letter calling for a six-month pause on developing more powerful AI systems, citing “profound risks to society and humanity” (though some have speculated that he had ulterior motives, such as buying time for xAI to catch up).

Discussing plans for building safer AI with xAI, Musk says that the company will avoid encoding explicit moral guidelines, and instead focus on developing a “maximally curious” system. “If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” he explains. “I think it is going to be pro-humanity, from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”

This is an interesting idea. Does the logic seem sound enough to pin the future of humanity on? Maybe not. After all, humanity itself is incredibly curious about the natural world, but that hasn’t stopped it from decimating rainforests, wiping out entire species, and driving orcas to the brink of insanity.

Musk has also predicted that superintelligence – as in, an AI that far surpasses the brightest human minds, and could kick off a never-ending cycle of more intelligent machines – is likely to arrive by the end of the decade. More information, and potentially-terrifying predictions, are likely to arrive in an xAI Twitter Spaces chat on Friday (July 14).

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