Elon Musk's announcement Wednesday that he’s joining the AI race with his new company, xAI, which will set out to “understand the true nature of the universe,” comes after fits and starts with the world's richest man's involvement with artificial intelligence. He was an original board member of OpenAI, departed in 2018, and was an an early investor in Deepmind, but before now he has never embraced the A.I. space as a solo pursuit, while often voicing concerns for the dangers posed by AI.
This year, as he's admitted to overpaying for Twitter by approximately $20 billion, he's seen his thunder in Silicon Valley stolen, first by OpenAI's ChatGPT, which became the talk of the Bay and Wall Street as it soared to the fastest adoption of any technological app in history. More recently, he's seen his rival Mark Zuckerberg launch a "Twitter killer," Threads, via Meta's Instagram app, and rack up an even faster adoption rate: Over 100 million users in less than a week.
