Tech giant and billionaire Elon Musk is starting yet another company, and this one has to do with the talk of the town: artificial intelligence. The name of the venture is “xAI.”

It’s been an interesting week in the tech and AI world. Meta released “Threads,” a Twitter alternative, and OpenAI is now under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, calling the AI company into question for its data scraping methods and ChatGPT’s tendency to spin false information. Now that AI is the apple in ever tech mogul’s eye at the moment, I guess it makes sense that Musk is reaching for the branch of temptation. He’s been teasing his hopes for his own AI company for a few months now.

However, it is Musk’s grandiose claims about his new company that might have some scratching their heads. In a tweet, Musk said xAI will be built as a truth-seeking device, intended to “understand reality.” Musk sees it as an alternative to ChatGPT, dubbing this bot “TruthGPT.” As summarized in Reuters,

“If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” Musk said. “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”

Elon Musk launches AI firm xAI as he looks to take on OpenAI (msn.com)

So, in the same week that OpenAI is under investigation, Elon Musk is pitching the world an alternative. And it’s ambitious, not mention provocative. What does he mean by “understanding,” and how could a computer really seek the truth? These are philosophical questions, not just computational ones, and the debate is sure to play out as xAI and other AI systems continue to develop and embed themselves into society.