money and can afford to dump billions of dollars into vanity projects,” says Flick. Musk didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story.The dozen named initial members of xAI’s team include former employees of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and Tesla, as well as researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada.Sign up to newsletter
Although the team is drawn from a diverse range of companies, its gender make-up is significantly less diverse: all are men. “He’s brought together a bunch of men to work on understanding the universe, whatever that means, which is, as a philosopher… it’s just the cheapest version of armchair philosophy,” says Flick.Besides attempting to understand the universe, it seems likely that xAI will try to develop what Musk deems a safer, fairer AI system.
“A lot of people who know Musk tend to think he’s well-intentioned and he’s worried about AI [being] developed in a wrong way, and he thinks he can do it in a safer way, but it’s hard to tell whether that’s sincere,” says