Elon Musk Takes On OpenAI, Google, Amazon And Others, But His AI Dreams Are Going in Circles
When Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in late 2015, he pledged to fund the non-profit lab with $1 billion of his own money; he had safety in mind and hoped to counter Google's stranglehold on AI research. That $1 billion never fully materialized, and Musk left OpenAI on bad terms.
Today he's trying to back another AI company (his own) with another $1 billion (not his own), according to an SEC filing (although, confusingly, he tweeted on Wednesday they are “not raising money right now”). That not only puts Musk back where he started on AI, it illustrates a pattern among wealthy technologists who've been chasing the transformative technology for the past decade: Their worries about how it could hurt humanity tend to get put aside as the race to make their systems more powerful heats up.
It's been less than a year since Musk signed an open letter calling on developers to take a six-month pause from training AI models. Instead of halting himself, Musk founded xAI, a research lab that competes with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind to build systems that could surpass human intelligence, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI).
xAI has a clever logo and an unusual mission statement: to “advance our collective understanding of the universe.” That harks back to another old dalliance of Musk's. Before backing OpenAI, he also invested in (and eventually exited) the cutting-edge AI lab DeepMind, whose founder Demis Hassabis wanted to build AGI to help unlock the mysteries of reality.
But the lofty goals of leaders like Hassabis and OpenAI's Sam Altman often fade to background music as their companies compete to build the most powerful systems and partner with Big Tech firms. OpenAI's philanthropic goals took a backseat as it
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