Elon Musk’s xAI secures $6B to challenge OpenAI in AI race

Elon Musk xAI secures $6 billion to challenge OpenAI in AI race

Elon Musk founded xAI last summer, and The Verge just reported that it's already making waves by announcing a massive $6 billion funding round. According to the company, this money will help bring xAI's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development efforts into future technologies.

Musk has some history in the AI space. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside the current CEO, Sam Altman, and others. However, he parted ways with...

29 May 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI: Musk wanted us to merge with Tesla or take ‘full control’

Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, allegedly wanted the AI research company OpenAI to either merge with Tesla or give him full control of the organisation.

A blog post from OpenAI, in response to a lawsuit filed by Musk against the company, revealed email communications from 2015 to 2018 when Musk was still involved with the company's operations. 

In one email from 2017 – as OpenAI was exploring a transition to a for-profit model to secure more...

6 March 2024 | Artificial Intelligence

Tesla’s AI supercomputer tripped the power grid

Tesla’s purpose-built AI supercomputer ‘Dojo’ is so powerful that it tripped the power grid.

Dojo was unveiled at Tesla’s annual AI Day last year but the project was still in its infancy. At AI Day 2022, Tesla unveiled the progress it has made with Dojo over the course of the year.

The supercomputer has transitioned from just a chip and training tiles into a full cabinet. Tesla claims that it can replace six GPU boxes with a single Dojo tile, which it says is...

3 October 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

Tesla’s director of AI departs the company

Andrej Karpathy, Director of AI at Tesla, has announced that he is departing the company.

Karpathy has spent the past five years at Tesla. Prior to Tesla, he was a research scientist at OpenAI working on computer vision and generative modelling. Go back further still and you’ll find he did his PhD at Stanford as part of leading AI expert Fei-Fei Li's research team.

The departure of Karparthy will be a major loss for Tesla. While at Tesla, Karparthy led the Autopilot...

15 July 2022 | Companies

AI Day: Elon Musk unveils ‘friendly’ humanoid robot Tesla Bot

During Tesla’s AI Day event, CEO Elon Musk unveiled a robot that is “intended to be friendly”.

Musk has been one of the most prominent figures to warn that AI is a “danger to the public” and potentially the “biggest risk we face as a civilisation”. In 2017, he even said there was just a “five to 10 percent chance of success [of making AI safe]”.

Speaking about London-based DeepMind in a New York Times interview last year, Musk said: “Just the nature...

20 August 2021 | Robotics

Musk’s claim that Tesla is the best AI chip designer is tested

Elon Musk’s claim that Tesla is the best AI chip designer in the world has been put to the test against other innovations.

“How could it be that Tesla, who has never designed a chip before – would design the best chip in the world?” Musk boasted in 2019. 

Select Car Leasing tested Tesla’s full self-driving microchip, which is developed by Samsung, against 12 other innovations:

Against some of mankind’s greatest innovations, Tesla’s chip...

18 May 2021 | Machine Learning

Elon Musk wants more stringent AI regulation, including for Tesla

tesla elon musk ai artificial intelligence regulation policy

Elon Musk has once again called for more stringent regulations around the development of AI technologies.

The founder of Tesla and SpaceX has been one of the most vocal prominent figures in expressing concerns about AI – going as far as to call it humanity’s “biggest existential threat” if left unchecked.

Of course, given the nature of the companies Musk has founded, he is also well aware of AI’s potential.

Back in 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI – an...

19 February 2020 | Ethics & Society

Elon Musk is hosting a ‘super fun’ AI hackathon at his house

Fresh from kicking off his EDM career, Elon Musk has announced Tesla will be hosting a “super fun” AI hackathon at his house.

In a tweet, Musk wrote: “Tesla will hold a super fun AI party/hackathon at my house with the Tesla AI/autopilot team in about four weeks. Invitations going out soon.”

The hackathon will focus on the AI behind Tesla’s problematic AutoPilot feature which has been reported to accelerate erratically. Tesla has denied the claims but the...

4 February 2020 | Artificial Intelligence

Nvidia CEO is ‘happy to help’ if Tesla’s AI chip ambitions fail

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has teased his company is 'happy to help’ if Tesla fails its goal to launch a competitor AI chip. Tesla currently uses Nvidia’s silicon for its vehicles. The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, said earlier this month that he’s a “big fan” of Nvidia but that an in-house AI chip would be able to outperform those of the leading processor manufacturer. During a conference call on Thursday, Huang said its customers are “super excited” about  Nvidia's Xavier...

17 August 2018 | Artificial Intelligence

Musk: Tesla is building its own AI chips

In an unsurprising revelation, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has finally admitted his company is building its own AI chips. Tesla is a pioneering and forward-looking company and, as our readers know well, AI is the future of just about everything. It would have been a safe bet Tesla intends to be at the forefront. During a Tesla-hosted party at the NIPS intelligence conference in Long Beach, which has been called ‘draft day’ for how AI companies use it to recruit talent, Musk told attendees: "I...

8 December 2017 | Artificial Intelligence