Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, launched his long-teased artificial intelligence startup xAI on Wednesday, unveiling a team comprised of engineers from the same big US technology firms that he hopes to challenge in his bid to build an alternative to ChatGPT.
The startup will be led by Musk, already the CEO of electric car maker Tesla, CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX and owner of Twitter, who has said on several occasions that the development of AI should be paused and that the sector needed regulation. Musk has repeatedly voiced concerns about AI’s potential for “civilizational destruction.”
In a Twitter Spaces event Wednesday evening, Musk explained his plan for building a safer AI. Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a “maximally curious” AI, he said.
“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,” Musk said. “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”
Musk also predicted that superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, will arrive in five or six years. Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.
Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.
The website for xAI said it will hold a Twitter Spaces event on July 14.
The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind; Tony Wu, who worked at Google; Christian Szegedy, who was also a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, who was previously at Microsoft.
Musk in March registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.
Musk had said in April that he would launch TruthGPT, or a maximum truth-seeking AI to rival Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.
Generative AI caught the limelight with OpenAI’s launch of popular chatbot ChatGPT, which came in November last year, ahead of the launch of Bard and Bing AI.
Dan Hendrycks, who will advise the xAI team, is currently director of the Center for AI Safety and his work revolves around the risks of AI.
Musk’s new company is separate from X Corp, but will work closely with Twitter, Tesla and other companies, according to the website.
xAI said it is recruiting experienced engineers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Elon Musk launches AI firm xAI as he looks to take on OpenAI
Elon Musk launches AI firm xAI as he looks to take on OpenAI
Meta to charge Arab advertisers extra fee for reaching European audiences
- US tech giant told advertisers it will add fees ranging from 2 to 5 percent on image and video ads delivered on its platforms to offset digital service taxes
- Charges are determined by where the audience is located, not where the advertiser is based
LONDON: Meta will from July 1 impose location-based surcharges on advertisers targeting audiences in six European countries, a move that will directly affect Arab businesses that run campaigns across the continent.
The US tech giant announced it will add fees ranging from 2 to 5 percent on image and video ads delivered on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to offset digital service taxes imposed by individual governments.
Crucially, the charges are determined by where the audience is located, not where the advertiser is based.
That means Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian or other Arab companies paying to reach consumers in the UK, France or Italy will face the additional costs regardless of their own country’s tax arrangements with Meta.
Fees will apply at 2 percent for ads reaching UK audiences, 3 percent for France, Italy and Spain, and 5 percent for Austria and Turkiye.
“If you deliver $100 in ads to Italy, where there is a 3% location fee, you will be charged $100 (ad delivery), plus $3 (location fee), for $103 total,” the company wrote in an email to an advertiser initially reported by Bloomberg. “Note that any applicable VAT will be calculated on top of the total amount.”
The taxes have been introduced at different points, starting with France in 2019, though not the EU as a bloc.
Many tech companies report substantial sales in Europe and millions of users but pay minimal tax on profits. The goal is to claw back locally derived economic value, Bloomberg reported.
The move follows similar decisions by Google and Amazon, which have also begun passing European digital tax costs on to advertisers.
For Arab brands with growing European footprints, particularly in fashion, travel, hospitality and media, the new fees add another layer of cost to campaigns already subject to currency and targeting complexities.
Digital services taxes, levied as a percentage of revenues earned by major tech platforms in individual countries, have drawn criticism from Washington, which argues they unfairly target US companies.
Meta has been reached for comments.
