(This article is authored by Alar)

Elon Musk, the visionary entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, is reportedly working on a new artificial intelligence startup that will compete with OpenAI, the research group he co-founded and later left. The new venture, called X.AI, will focus on building generative AI systems that can produce human-like text and images from massive amounts of data.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Musk incorporated X.AI in Nevada last month and has authorized the sale of 100 million shares for the privately held company. He has also secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors from Nvidia, the leading chipmaker for AI applications. GPUs are essential for training large language models, such as ChatGPT, which can generate realistic text on any topic.

Musk is also assembling a team of AI experts and engineers from top labs such as DeepMind, and is in talks with some investors in SpaceX and Tesla about funding his new venture. Among the engineers he has hired is Igor Babuschkin, a former DeepMind employee who has worked on natural language processing and reinforcement learning.

X.AI will be Musk’s latest addition to his diverse portfolio of businesses and projects, which include Twitter, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. It will also mark his return to the field of AI research, after he left OpenAI in 2018 due to disagreements with its management over AI safety and ethics. Musk has been vocal about his concerns about the potential dangers of AI, especially superintelligence, which he once called “the biggest existential threat” to humanity.

However, Musk has also been fascinated by the possibilities of AI, especially for his own ventures. He has said that Tesla’s self-driving technology will be powered by AI, and that Neuralink’s brain-computer interface will enable humans to communicate with AI. He has also expressed interest in ChatGPT and its ability to generate coherent text on any topic.

X.AI will face stiff competition from OpenAI, which has become one of the most influential and well-funded AI research groups in the world. OpenAI has partnered with Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in 2019 and provides cloud computing resources for its projects. OpenAI has also released several groundbreaking AI systems, such as ChatGPT-3, DALL-E, and Codex, which have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language generation, image synthesis, and code generation.

It remains unclear what X.AI’s exact goals and vision are, and how it will differ from OpenAI’s approach. However, given Musk’s track record of innovation and disruption, it is likely that X.AI will be a formidable player in the AI landscape and will push the boundaries of what generative AI can do.