Elon Musk the blazes trail, redefines future

Last summer, Elon Musk established xAI, and The Verge recently highlighted its signi.impact with news of a staggering $6 billion funding round. xAI aims to leverage this substantial investment to introduce its inaugural products to the market, bolster its infrastructure, and expedite research and development endeavors aimed at pioneering future technologies.

Musk helped create OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman and others.But in 2018, he left because they didn't see eye-to-eye. OpenAI switched from sharing its AI for free to selling it,which Musk didn't like. Since then, Musk has been one of OpenAI's biggest critics,

Jump to July of last year, and Musk made a big comeback in generative AI by introducing xAI. Since then, the company has been dedicated to creating highly advanced AI systems. They promise these systems will be "truthful, competent, and incredibly beneficial for everyone on Earth.

One of xAI’s initial products is Grok, which presents a more cutting-edge take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Currently, it's exclusively accessible to X Premium subscribers. According to benchmarks provided by xAI, Grok-1 showcased superior performance compared to models like Llama-2-70B and GPT-3.5. However, it still falls behind Anthropic’s Claude3, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s open-source Llama 3.

The ongoing AI race for chips, talent, and technology is poised to be expensive. Big tech firms have already poured billions into AI startups like Anthropic, in addition to substantial investments from companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta in their own AI projects.

Creating hardware capable of driving AI at such an advanced level is a significant challenge and comes with substantial costs. Recently, a report unveiled that xAI would require an impressive 100,000 of Nvidia’s latest H100 chips to build a supercomputer capable of running an enhanced version of Grok. Each of these chips is priced between $30,000 to $40,000.

Musk has ambitious plans for these potent resources. He reportedly informed investors that the aim is to inaugurate this new data center by fall 2025, signifying a remarkable stride in xAI’s technological prowess.

Microsoft, in particular, has forged a multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI. Its CEO, Sam Altman, is reportedly seeking trillions more to revolutionize the global chip industry.

At the same time, Tesla is gearing up for its annual meeting on June 13, where shareholders will start voting on whether to reinstate Musk’s record-breaking $56 billion pay package, a significant development given Musk’s substantial influence across various tech sectors.

Over the years, Musk has made significant contributions to AI research, and now his venture, xAI, is leading the charge in AI advancements. It will be captivating to witness how these endeavors unfold and which of xAI’s contributions will etch a place in the history of AI during this rapid evolution.