In 2018, Elon Musk walked away from OpenAI, which he had cofounded three years earlier as a research outfit dedicated to building safe AI. He said it was due to a conflict of interest with Tesla’s rival AI efforts; subsequent reports say he lost a power struggle. Either way, Musk departed with his billions, and OpenAI fell into Microsoft’s lifesaving embrace.
Five years on, Musk is back in the AI game. In July, he announced the formation of xAI—which, despite its use of Musk’s favorite letter, is a separate company from X Corp. “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the announcement began. The numbers in the date of the announcement (7/12/23), Musk tweeted, totaled 42: the figure which, in the comic science fiction classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, represents the frustrating answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.”
