Elon Musk announced XAI - the answer to OpenAI = X.AI

Key Takeaways

so the 800 pound gorilla himself Mr Elon Musk has entered the chat announcing formation of xai the competitor to Chad GPT to open AI that we knew was coming that he said was coming but it's here now and it's rolling out fast its Mission and this is where it gets a little bit weird is to understand reality one of the most fundamental unanswered questions uh an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe let's take a look at what this company is who's running it who's the brain power behind it why understanding reality is its Mission and what this means for AI so the website is x dot a i announcing xai so July 12 2023 today we announced the formation of xai the goal of xai is to understand the true nature of the universe more on that in just a second I think I know where he's going with this and then Friday July 14th is going to be a Twitter spaces where they're going to be chatting about it and answering some questions so probably a good idea to tune in so the team is led by Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX Fame and team previously worked at deepmind openai Google research Microsoft research Tesla and the University of Toronto they're responsible so for some pretty big breakthroughs in this field including things like Alpha star Alpha code Inception Minerva GPT 3.5 and gpt4 we'll take a look at all the players in here in just a second and on The Advisory Board the team is advised by Dan Hendricks Who currently serves as the Director of Center for AI safety Elon has repeatedly said that AI safety is one of the biggest priorities for him and he is genuinely worried about sort of the existential threat of AI and of course this is a separate company from all his other stuff so it's not related to Twitter it's not related to Tesla or anything else like that it's its own separate thing so really fast so this is Jim Dr Jim fan so he's an Nvidia senior AI scientist so he was one of the appeal behind Voyager the Minecraft AI agent I do have a video on that if you're interested so he is this a linksy fat on there that's that might be a little confusing so that's that that's him on there um he goes by Dr Jim fan on Twitter a great follow if you're interested in the space you know one of the things he pointed out is there's a lot of multimodal data on Twitter Elon comes in buys Twitter at this sort of astronomical evaluation a lot of people are like what is he doing but it does contain text images growing collection of long videos and you know shortly thereafter he announces the formation of x dot Ai and that's going to be the only a company that has direct and legal access to such an enormous and daily expanding Corpus also he's behind Tesla which supposedly has a very Advanced AI for full set driving cars and they do have a lot of experience in in building a lot of these huge training clusters and of course there is the Tesla bot which would be sort of the the physical agent the physical embodiment of the x dot AI brain more on that in a second but he kind of goes over some of the people that are working for the company that are on the company let's there's there's actually a better tweet that kind of goes over it let's find it so here's a quick breakdown so Elon we of course everybody knows Elon right then there's Igor babushkin so he's a distinguished AI researcher I believe he's the guy that Elon was trying to poach from Google deepmind Google deepminds of course um the other big sort of competitor in the AI space you know this guy Demis hasabis he's sort of the genius behind Google deepmind they're doing a lot of the stuff that you hear about like Alpha fold Alpha code you know all the the Starcraft AI all the chess AI all the alphago the go playing AI it's a lot of the crazy breakthroughs that you see are in part thanks to this guy he's kind of driving that animation forward so handpicked by Elon Musk for his expertise babushkin has been engaged in developing a rival chatbot to open the ai's chai gbt which he sees as being trained to be woke so we're gonna go into that in just a second um in this sort of culture War there's a lot of different words used away different sides that kind of like make everything a little bit makes a little bit complicated sometimes to understand who means what what what does bulk even mean I'll show you a few Clips in just a second that I think kind of like illuminate what we're talking about here then we have Manuel cross cross I'm not sure how to pronounce his last name but looks like he's been working for Google deepmind and contributing advancements to reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence then we have Tony Wu who uh his work centers on developing machines capable of human-like reasoning particularly in math another ex-google employee that has expertise in deep learning artificial intelligence computer vision video analysis Etc Jimmy ba who focuses on machines that mirror human-like efficiency and adaptability then we have Toby Poland who work on the alpha star that's the Starcraft deep mine research AI then we have Ross nordine who is actually from Tesla his aim is to pass the great filter achieve a type 1 status on the Kardashian scale and launch of on Newman probes to explore the Galaxy big goals so really fast I'll skip some of the other ones but we have people from open EI we have people from Microsoft the University of Toronto we have a lot of we have a lot of people that have a lot of experience in the field that are joining us team and that's just a start I'm sure once they start rolling out different projects different applications we're going to get more and more people joining the list you know Elon Musk is hated by some but there are a lot of people that kind of think that whatever he touches tends to work out pretty well he's a pretty polarizing guy you have people that love him or hate them people that think that he can do no wrong and people that think that everything he does is wrong he can't trust anything that he says you might be on one of those extremes as well but whatever the case I mean he's one of the richest people on the planet so and and that buys you a lot of brain power here are a few clips that I think really summarize what has been leading up to this moment uh an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe kind of took my off the ball I guess and uh they are now closed source and they are obviously for-profit and they're um closely allied with Microsoft uh you know in effect Microsoft uh has a very strong say if not um directly controls uh openai at this point so you really have an open-end Microsoft situation and then at Google deepmind uh the other two sort of heavyweights in this Arena so it seems like the world needs a third option yes so I I I think I will create a third option although I was starting very late in the game uh like the intention with open AI was obviously to do good but it's not clear whether it's actually doing good or whether it's I can't tell at this point um except that I'm worried about the fact that uh it's being it's being trained to be politically correct which is simply another way of of being on Truth saying untruthful things yes so that's that's a bad sign there's certainly a path to AI dystopia is to train AI to be deceptive so yeah I'm going to start something which you call truth gbt or a maximum truth seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe and I think this this might be the best path to safety I think we agree on the magnitude of the downside of AGI and the need to get not only safety right but get to a world where people are much better off because AGI exists and if AGI had never been built yeah what do you disagree on Elon is obviously attacking us some on Twitter right now on a few different vectors and I have empathy because I believe he is understandably so really stressed about AGI safety I'm sure there are some other motivations going on too but that's definitely one of them um I saw this video of Elon a long time ago talking about SpaceX maybe he's on some new show and a lot of early Pioneers in space were really bashing SpaceX and maybe Elon too and he was visibly very hurt by that and said you know those guys are heroes of mine and I sucks and I wish they would see how hard we're trying um I definitely grew up with Elon as a hero of mine um You know despite him being a jerk on Twitter whatever I'm happy he exists in the world but I wish he would do more to look at the hard work we're doing to get this stuff right so getting to risk number two will AI ruin our society short version as you write if the murder robots don't get us the hate speech and misinformation will and the action you recommend in short don't let the thought police suppress AI well what is uh this risk of the effect of misinformation of society that's going to be catalyzed by AI yeah so this is the social media this is what you just alluded to it's the activism kind of thing that's popped up in these companies and in the industry and it's basically from my perspective it's basically part two of the war that played out over social media over the last 10 years um because you probably remember social media 10 years ago was basically who even wants this who wants who wants a photo of what your cat had for breakfast like this stuff is like silly interview and why can't these nerds like figure out how to invent something like useful and powerful and then you know certain things happened in the political system and then it's sort of the polarity on that discussion switched all the way to social media is like the worst most corrosive most terrible most awful technology ever invented and it leads to you know terrible the wrong you know politicians and policies and politics and like and all this stuff and that that all got catalyzed into this very big kind of angry movement both inside and outside the companies to kind of bring social media to to heal and that got focused in particular on two topics so-called hate speech and so-called misinformation um and that's been to Saga playing out for the last for the last decade and I don't even really want to even argue the pros and cons of the sides just to observe that that's been like a huge fight and has had you know big consequences to how these companies operate um basically that same those same sets of theories that same activist approach that same energy as being transplanted straight to Ai and you see that already happening it's why you know GPT will answer let's say certain questions and not others um it's why it gives you the canned speech about you know whenever it starts with as a large language model I cannot you know basically means that somebody has reached in there and told it it can't talk about certain topics um do you think some of that is good so it's a it's an interesting question um so a couple of couple observations um so so one is um the people who find this the most frustrating are the people who are worried about the murder robots right so so and in fact the the X so-called ex-risk people right they started with the term AI safety the term became AI alignment when the term became AI alignment is when this switch happened from where word is going to kill us all we're worried about his Fusion misinformation the AIX risk people have now renamed their thing uh AI not kill everyone ISM um which I have to admit is a catchy term and they are very frustrated by the fact that the sort of activist driven hate speech misinformation kind of thing is taking over which is what's happened it's taken over the AI ethics field has been taken over by the speech misinformation people um you know look would I like to live in a world in which like everybody was nice to each other all the time and nobody ever said anything mean and nobody ever used a bad word and everything was always accurate and honest like that sounds great do I want to live in a world where there's like a centralized thought police working through the tech companies to enforce the view of a small set of Elites that they're going to determine what the rest of us think and feel like absolutely not honestly I barely know what woke means anymore I did for a while and I feel like the word is morphed so I will say I think it was too biased and will always be there will be no one version of GPT that the world ever agrees is unbiased what I think is we've made a lot like again even some of our harshest critics have gone off and been tweeting about 3.5 to 4 comparisons and being like wow these people really got a lot better not that they don't have more work to do and we certainly do but I I appreciate critics who display intellectual honesty like that yeah and there there's been more of that than I would have thought um we will try to get the default version to be as neutral as possible but as neutral as possible is not that neutral if you have to do it again for more than one person and so this is where more durability more control in the hands of the user the system message in particular is I think the real path forward and as you pointed out these nuanced answers to look at something from several angles