Who bets on Musk’s (artificial) intelligence
Now xAI, the artificial intelligence startup wanted by Musk to preside over a field previously in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and a few others, will be able to get serious. The six billion just confiscated will have to be used to recover the ground. At work is a super team of 11 experts who have convinced some of the largest investors on the planet to bet on the startup. Despite Grok's disappointing results
If money was needed to compete worthily with ChatGpt, Gemini, Copilot and Claude (but the list would be really long), now they have arrived. The six billion raised by Elon Musk like any startupper, knocking hat in hand at the most important Venture capitals in the world, are the fuel needed to really get serious, after the false start of Grok, who seemed to have debuted more to raise a flag rather than to break the rules, as his father likes, the histrionic tycoon already in charge of Tesla, Neuralink, Starlink, SpaceX, etc…
SIX BILLION TO RECOVER THE LOST GROUND
Artificial intelligences may be virtual, but they are truly bottomless pits: they swallow data – a frightening amount of data – and money. Lots of money. This is why the six billion raised in the last few hours risk being just the appetizer and will soon end up in the furnace so as to allow xAI , the startup hastily set up by Musk, to reduce the distance compared to Google's artificial intelligences, Microsoft and obviously OpenAI (also financed by Microsoft, for 11 billion).
THE DISPUTE WITH OPENAI
From this point of view, knowing Musk's ego, ChatGpt is certainly the opponent to beat. In fact, we must not forget that the owner of Tesla had participated in the project from the beginning, only to abandon it shortly before the market exploded.
A sign that even Musk doesn't always have a nose for business. Even if the South African entrepreneur subsequently provided a completely different interpretation of the facts: he would have left in controversy, especially with the current founder and CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman , guilty of having transformed the software house from a non-profit to an all-round enterprise , with profit as the main aim.
An accusation that is difficult to believe, especially because it was made by Musk who did not become the richest man in the world thanks to non-profits, but which fits perfectly with the tribulations experienced in the last period by OpenAI, which left several brilliant minds , all disagreeing with the strategy developed by Altman.
WHO FINANCES MUSK'S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
While Grok is currently reeling and stumbling, Musk's presence as a guarantor of last resort has allowed xAI to raise money from some of the business world's biggest investors.
The new funding round was supported by Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Fidelity Management & Research Company, among others. The company's pre-money valuation was $18 billion, Musk said in a post on Numbers that leave the time they find, more virtual and impalpable than the artificial intelligence on which the team wanted by Musk is working.
WHO BET ON MUSK'S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Because if Venture Capitals put in money, there are also those who have decided to bet much more on it, that is, their own careers. They are the eleven super experts that the entrepreneur has gathered around his project in an attempt to excel in that field too.
They were in all likelihood paid their weight in gold and come from currently more established companies such as OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and DeepMind. They range from Igor Babuschkin , to Manuel Kroiss , passing through Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai. One of the supervisors of xAI will be Dan Hendrycks , director of the Center for AI Safety, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco that aims to protect the world from the risks associated with artificial intelligence.
A not too veiled jab addressed to Sam Altman, who has just dismantled OpenAI's Superalignment , an internal committee at the software house taken under the wing of Microsoft designed to ask moral questions in the context of the development of an unknown and potentially dangerous technology, not only regarding the development of particularly refined deep fakes, but also for its impact on the world of work.
AI discussion with @RishiSunak
pic.twitter.com/f5FHGQzE4r— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2023
Musk himself is convinced that with artificial intelligence there will no longer be jobs for anyone. He has been repeating it for months now (the news has been bouncing around in recent days, but in reality the same concepts were expressed in this exchange with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak dated 2 November 2023: attached to the tweet above you can find the speech integral) and he says he is sure that a universal income will be needed to avoid hunger. A vision that certainly does not make its intelligence any less dangerous than the artificial ones currently being developed in software houses around the world.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/chi-scommette-sullintelligenza-artificiale-di-musk/ on Tue, 28 May 2024 08:24:07 +0000.