xAI: Musk’s ChatGPT alternative for Tesla Bot

[Chris]

Elon Musk has announced the formation of a new artificial intelligence company called xAI.

The goal of xAI is to “understand the true nature of the universe” and create “good AGI”.

It is interesting to note xAI only came into being after Musk embarked on his pursuit of Tesla Bot. Currently Musk has the navigational FSD software from Tesla to use in Tesla Bot. This allows Tesla Bot to navigate autonomously and have situational awareness in the real world. But it currently lacks the ability to engage in a conversation, something only an embedded Large Language Model or LLM can achieve. This LLM will be trained on huge amounts of text data from Twitter; and probably explains Musk’s interest in acquiring that social media platform.

To create an AI system capable of natural language conversation and problem solving abilities for Tesla Bot Musk has gone to the extraordinary lengths of beginning a separate company dedicated entirely to the goal of creating Artificial General Intelligence(AGI). This AGI will allow Tesla Bot to reason and complete tasks in an intelligent manner.

Musk’s AGI will comprise the abilities of real world awareness from the FSD with awareness of text from Twitter; resulting in a software that can assign contextual values to the visual data it is intaking, giving this software a form of AGI.

This AGI announcement also coincides with the production of the Dojo supercomputer, which Tesla wants to use to train the neural nets that will power this AGI being developed by xAI.

How AGI encapsulated in a robotic body that can move about in the environment will work out is anyone’s guess. Will Tesla Bot have an embedded offline LLM or equivalent or will it be entirely cloud dependent?

Elon Musk announces xAI as he seeks to build ChatGPT alternative​

Elon Musk, who has hinted for months that he wants to build an alternative to the popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot, announced the formation of what he’s calling xAI, whose goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe”.

On a website unveiled on Wednesday, xAI said its team would be led by Mr Musk and staffed by executives who have worked at a broad range of companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence, including Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and Tesla, as well as academic institutions such as the University of Toronto.

Mr Musk was involved in the creation of OpenAI, the highest-profile AI start-up and developer of ChatGPT. But he has frequently and publicly criticised OpenAI since he left the board in 2018, especially after it created a for-profit arm the following year. He said it was “effectively controlled by Microsoft”. Microsoft has invested some $US13 billion ($19 billion) into OpenAI.

Despite his work in AI, Mr Musk has expressed deep reservations about the technology. The billionaire was among a group of researchers and tech industry leaders who in March called for developers to pause the training of powerful AI models.

The 12 men listed on the website as of Wednesday morning (including Mr Musk) include Jimmy Ba, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who studied under AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, and Christian Szegedy, who spent years as a research scientist working on AI at Google.

Though Mr Musk is a frequent critic of San Francisco, the xAI website says that the company is “actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers” to work “in the Bay Area”. So far, most AI development has been concentrated in Silicon Valley.

Mr Musk and Jared Birchall, who operates Mr Musk’s family office, incorporated a business called X.AI in March, according to a Nevada state filing with the Secretary of State.

In April, the Financial Times reported that Mr Musk was holding discussions with Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp investors about helping fund an AI start-up, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. The billionaire has acquired thousands of processors from Nvidia for the new project, the paper said.

The xAI website said the company was being advised by Dan Hendrycks, who is the director of the Centre for AI Safety – a group that has warned about what it sees as existential dangers of developing AI quickly. This spring, it released a letter of caution signed by chief executive officers of some of the leading companies in AI, including Alphabet’s DeepMind and OpenAI.

Mr Musk, 52, now oversees six companies: Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Neuralink, Boring Co and now xAI. In regulatory filings, Tesla says the auto giant is “increasingly focused on products and services based on artificial intelligence, robotics and automation”.

Tesla’s website invites people to help “build the future of artificial intelligence” with a variety of products, from the “Tesla Bot” known as Optimus to AI interface chips that will run the electric automaker’s automated driving software.



Mr Musk has a long history of borrowing engineers from one company to help out at another, as the contours of his ever-expanding empire bleed into one another. Tesla and SpaceX share a vice president of materials engineering, for example, and engineers from Tesla “volunteered” to work at Twitter after Mr Musk bought the company for $US44 billion in October.

The xAI website says that it is a “separate company from X Corp”, the parent company that Mr Musk merged Twitter into earlier this year, but that it will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies”.

Source: https://www.afr.com/technology/elon...-to-build-chatgpt-alternative-20230713-p5dnvm

xAI website: https://x.ai/

 

[Chris]

It’s always so interesting when Musk talks, love the honesty and transparency expressed about xAI here. Really feel Musk is the right person to trust with creating safe AGI.

Today Elon Musk held a Twitter Space to discuss xAI.Here is a recap of what was discussed for those who missed it:

- The founding team was on hand to introduce themselves, and I must say it is an impressive team with an impressive background. They had very strong backgrounds with Deep Mind, OpenAI, Google, Tesla, etc.

- Elon Musk said the goal with xAI is to build a good AGI (artificial general intelligence) with the purpose of understanding the universe.

- Musk said that the safest way is to build an AGI that is ‘maximum curious’ and ‘truth curious,’ and to try and minimize the error between what you think is true and what is actually true.

- For truth-seeking super intelligence humanity is much more interesting than not humanity, so that’s the safest way to create one. Musk gave the example of how space and Mars is super interesting but it pales in comparison to how interesting humanity is.

- Musk said there is so much that we think we understand but we don’t in reality. There are a lot of unresolved questions. For example, there are many questions that remain about the nature of gravity, and why there is not massive evidence of aliens. He said he has seen no evidence of aliens whatsoever so far. He went further into the Fermi Paradox and how it's possible that other consciousness may not exist in our galaxy.

- If you ask today’s advanced AIs technical questions, you just get nonsense, so Musk believes we are really missing the mark by many orders of magnitude and that needs to get better.

- xAI will use heavy computing, but the amount of ‘brute force’ will become less as they become to understand the problem better.

- Co-Founder Greg Yang said that the mathematics they find at xAi could open up new perspectives to existing questions like the 'Theory of Everything.'

- Elon stated that you can't call anything AGI until the computer solves at least one fundamental question.

- He said that from his experience at Tesla, they have over complicated problems. “We are too dumb to realize how simple the answers really are," he said. "We will probably find this out with AGI as well. Once AGI is solved, we will look back and think, why did we think it would be so hard.”

- They are going to release more information on the first release of xAI in a couple more weeks.

- Elon Musk said that xAI is being built as competition to OpenAI, when asked by @krassenstein

https://twitter.com/krassenstein

- The goal is to make xAI a useful tool for consumers and businesses and there is value in having multiple entities and competition. Elon said that competition makes companies honest, and he’s in favor of competition.

- Musk said every organization doing AI has illegally used Twitter’s data for training. Limits had to be put on Twitter because they were being scraped like crazy. Multiple entities were trying to scrape every tweet ever made in a span of days. xAI will use tweets as well for training.

- At some point you run out of human-created data. So eventually AI will have to generate its own content and self-access that content.

- Answering a question from
@alx
, Musk said there is a significant danger in training AI to be politically correct or training it not to say what it thinks is true, so at xAI they will let the AI say what it believes to be true, and Musk believes it will result in some criticism.

- Musk said it’s very dangerous to grow an AI and teach it to lie.

- Musk said he would accept a meeting with Kamala Harris if invited. He said he’s not sure if Harris is the best person to be the AI czar, but agrees we need regulatory oversight.

- Musk believes that China too will have AI regulation. He said the CCP doesn’t want to find themselves subservient to a digital super intelligence.

- Musk believes we will have a voltage transformer shortage in a year and electricity shortage in 2 years.

- xAI will work with Tesla in multiple ways and it will be of mutual benefit. Tesla’s self-driving capabilities will be enhanced because of xAI.

- According to Musk, the proper way to go about AI regulations is to start with insight. If a proposed rule is agreed upon by all or most parties then that rule should be adopted. It should not slow things down for a great amount of time. A little bit of slowing down is OK if it's for safety.

- Musk thinks that Ray Kurzweil's prediction of AGI by 2029 is pretty accurate, give or take a year.

Source:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1679971231280365568

 

[Chris]

xAI recently announced their LLM conversational AI known as Grok.

Here is what xAI had to say about it:

Announcing Grok!

Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!

Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!

A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.

Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training – so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week with your help.

Thank you,the xAI Team

Source:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1721027348970238035

Grok is achieving results on par with current LLM despite only being 4 months old and trained on a smaller amount of data!

The engine powering Grok is Grok-1, our frontier LLM, which we developed over the last four months. Grok-1 has gone through many iterations over this span of time.

After announcing xAI, we trained a prototype LLM (Grok-0) with 33 billion parameters. This early model approaches LLaMA 2 (70B) capabilities on standard LM benchmarks but uses only half of its training resources. In the last two months, we have made significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities leading up to Grok-1, a state-of-the-art language model that is significantly more powerful, achieving 63.2% on the HumanEval coding task and 73% on MMLU.

On these benchmarks, Grok-1 displayed strong results, surpassing all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1. It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4. This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.

Since these benchmarks can be found on the web and we can’t rule out that our models were inadvertently trained on them, we hand-graded our model (and also Claude-2 and GPT-4) on the 2023 Hungarian national high school finals in mathematics, which was published at the end of May, after we collected our dataset. Grok passed the exam with a C (59%), while Claude-2 achieved the same grade (55%), and GPT-4 got a B with 68%. All models were evaluated at temperature 0.1 and the same prompt. It must be noted that we made no effort to tune for this evaluation. This experiment served as a “real-life” test on a dataset our model was never explicitly tuned for.

Source: https://x.ai/

You can sign up to be an early Grok beta tester here: https://grok.x.ai/

An example of what Grok is capable of re-tweeted by Musk:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1723324235882381412

Musk is definitely enjoying this

https://twitter.com/x/status/1723452839236620505

 

[Chris]

I think the game changer with Grok is that it may be integrated into the Tesla motor vehicles to give them a form of embodied AGI.