Elon Wants to Master the Universe With xAI

Elon Musk announced his new artificial intelligence company xAI on Wednesday, stating that its aim was to “understand the true nature of the universe.”

It’s hard to pick apart the reasoning on that goal, which sounds like it came out of a magic mushroom journey. Why does Musk want to understand the universe?

Then again, why did he buy Twitter? Why did he challenge Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match? It isn’t easy to get inside the brain of Elon Musk.

The name of his latest venture plays into all sorts of Elon tropes, from using the letter X to announcing it on a date that adds up to 42, the number that “Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams cryptically offered as the single answer to the meaning of life.

But set aside the usual Musk eccentricities and it looks like he could make life difficult for Google in the battle to develop cutting-edge AI.

Musk’s description of the AI challenge might sound familiar to the team at DeepMind, the artificial intelligence lab that Google bought in 2015. DeepMind’s founder Demis Hassabis was the first AI entrepreneur to openly state that he wanted to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) back when he co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010, and he has consistently described his motives in abstract, even philosophical terms. His Twitter bio today still reads, “Working on AGI. Trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality.”