Elon Musk is starting a new AI company that aims to 'understand reality'

With Twitter in ruins, the SpaceX Starship program grounded, and Tesla facing renewed scrutiny over the dangers of its Autopilot software, Elon Musk has now set his sights on his next big venture: an AI company whose stated goal is nothing less than to "understand reality."

This does appear to be a serious enterprise. The team at xAI, as the company is known, is made up of veterans of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. It's headed up by Musk, of course, and is being advised by Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, the group that in May asked someone to please do something about AI before we're all totally hosed. 

The xAI website says the new company is separate from X Corp, the company Musk established earlier this year as a successor to Twitter, "but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission."

Musk has previously mused about wading into the murky waters of artificial intelligence: in April, he said he was working on TruthGPT, which he described as "a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe." We weren't entirely certain how serious he was at the time, but apparently he's more committed to his AI plan than he was to buying Twitter.

While the xAI leadership team seems like it's mostly a collection of respectable figures in the field, Musk himself is unsurprisingly sending what could politely be called mixed signals in that regard. 

The xAI website says interested followers will be able to "meet the team and ask us questions" in a Twitter Spaces chat set for July 14. As for why Musk revealed the company today, three days ahead of the big online showcase, apparently it's for essentially the same reason he insisted on SpaceX launching Starship on April 20 despite the fact that systems weren't fully ready: He thought it would be clever.