X.AI Corp., doing business as xAI, is an American startup company working in the area of artificial intelligence (AI). It was founded on March 9, 2023, in Nevada by Elon Musk. According to the company's website as of July 2023, "The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe."
Background
In 2015, Musk joined the inaugural board of directors at the non-profit AI research company OpenAI. He invested as much as $1 billion in OpenAI, but stepped down from the board in 2018 after an unsuccessful bid to take over its management, the result of a disagreement over AI safety.
Framework
In April 2023, the Financial Times reported that Musk was planning to launch an AI startup. He had secured thousands of Nvidia GPU processors for a potential new large language model.
Musk officially announced the formation of xAI on July 12, 2023. The date (7 + 12 + 23 = 42) was chosen as a reference to the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (in which a supercomputer calculates that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42) and to the company's mission "to understand the universe". The company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. According to the project's leaders, one of xAI's goals is to create an AI that is capable of advanced mathematical reasoning, something not found in current models.
On July 14, Musk said in a Twitter Space that xAI would create a chatbot called "TruthGPT", which would act as an alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Musk also asserted that xAI's would be more trustworthy than OpenAI and Google.