xAI

&gt; We are actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers to join our team as members of our technical staff in the Bay Area.<p>It&#x27;s funny that after all the talk of remote work, tech globalization and the SF&#x2F;Silicon Valley exodus in the last few years (including much of it from Musk himself), we end up with pretty much all mainstream AI companies – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, Scale AI, Midjourney, and now this one – primarily hiring in-office in the Bay Area.<p>The technological center of world continues to be a hundred square miles in Northern California, whether people like it or not.

&gt; The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>Who wants to bet it&#x27;s going to end up launching a &quot;me too&quot; generative AI product.<p>Maybe Musk should first take these skills to Tesla&#x27;s self driving division then worry about the rest of the universe.

It has been the collective goal of the many fields of science, throughout the history of humankind, to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>There&#x27;s something that feels incredibly ostentatious about the opening sentence &quot;<i>The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.</i>&quot;. Not because I think it&#x27;s a bad goal, or a goal that no company can claim, but because of the broader context around AI and Musk&#x27;s antics.<p>I&#x27;m genuinely curious to see what comes out of this, but it also gives me the same queasy feeling in my gut that I got when looking at various crypto initiatives over the years.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt that there are incredibly smart people getting involved. It&#x27;s just a bit difficult to take it seriously. I hope to be proven wrong.

&gt; The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>People are misinterpreting this as the research goal. No, it&#x27;s an implicit negation of an ethos - AI Ethics, Trust &amp; Safety, ESG, Politically Correct - that have dominated decision making in product and hiring in tech for the past decade.<p>Whether or not you agree with him, it&#x27;s hard to deny that Musk is the only one offering researchers an escape from the bowing to the orthodoxy while also offering an A+ pedigree institution.

&gt; The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>Genuinely curious: Does anybody take this stuff seriously?<p>I just feel embarrassed to be working in tech (in Silicon Valley of all places), being associated with these charlatan clowns peddling nonsense like this and being praised for it.

I count a dozen dudes. I don’t think we’re gonna figure out the true nature of the universe via that kind of monocultural uniformity.

&gt; The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>That&#x27;s kind of what the whole natural sciences community is doing. Like that is one way to define what natural sciences are about. That&#x27;s basically the biggest goal anyone could mention. Like your cliche &quot;world peace&quot; answer that no beauty contestant ever says any more.

Huh. I thought _understanding universe_ would require research in quantum mechanics, string theory, astrophysics… you know - physics. Not _AI_.

In AI research, the acronym XAI stands for eXplainable AI [1]. To understand anything about the universe, AI will need to (i) make accurate predictions about some parts of the universe and (ii) explain the laws and the models it used to make these predictions, just like natural sciences do [2]. I believe eXplainable AI can get us there one day. However, I&#x27;m surprised that, despite it&#x27;s name, xAI doesn&#x27;t mention eXplainable AI and the team doesn&#x27;t seem to have experience in eXplainable AI, which makes me think it&#x27;s just another deep-learning AI venture.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Explainable_artificial_intelligence" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Explainable_artificial_intelli...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Scientific_method" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Scientific_method</a>

I can’t tell what this company does.<p>Does anyone know?

&gt; The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>That is.. a bit vague ? What is the purpose, and what does it have to do with AI ?<p>Why launch such a teaser without announcing the (actual) goal ?<p>They cannot really think that they will be able to understand &quot;the true nature of the universe&quot; ?

What Musk needs to do is fund smart people to do interesting stuff and then get out of the way. If that&#x27;s what this is, great. If it&#x27;s just another opportunity for him to do something high-profile and half-baked to massage his weirdly fragile ego: Ugh.

... not to be confused with X the moonshot factory? ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;X_(company)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;X_(company)</a> )

&gt; The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>Understanding the true nature of intelligence would be a good start, and also a better fit for a company with AI in its name.

For those in the know, any comments about the team? Looks impressive to my uniformed eyes.

Unless I am missing something, the current company is literally 100% men - not unexpected given Musk&#x27;s alleged chauvinism: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;business&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;09&#x2F;elon-musk-sexism-row-ex-twitter-staff-say-women-targeted-layoffs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;business&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;09&#x2F;elon-musk-se...</a>

If only Elon hadn&#x27;t splurged the 40+ billion on Twitter, he could&#x27;ve been stacked with H100&#x27;s right about now.

&quot;The true nature of the universe&quot; is either about cosmology or it&#x27;s (wrongly) about ontology&#x2F;metaphysics. Both seem like interesting pursuits. Fitting cosmological models to massive datasets from astonomical observations seems laudable and not entirely out of reach (one approach: space- and time-localized NeRF fitting on the entire visible universe accounting for relativistic effects). It would be strange to describe discovering ontologies as learning the &quot;true nature&quot; of things unless you were a hardcore idealist&#x2F;Platonist, but that seems more appropriate given the starting points afforded by the current state of the field and the hype that surrounds LLMs.

I wonder if this can understand Twitter. I&#x27;m also curious as to how it can possibly &quot;even out&quot; his portfolio even as it tanks in value, and how he got those folk to join up at this stage...

Five years ago, I would have leapt at this. Today, there&#x27;s no way I&#x27;d want to be anywhere near a Musk-based tech company.

Circle that drain

I wonder if the &#x27;true nature of the universe&#x27; refers to the simulation hypothesis? There&#x27;s a belief in some circles that a sufficiently powerful AGI would be able to &#x27;hack the simulation.&#x27;

&gt;x.ai<p>Some historical bedtime reading for the curious:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Single-letter_second-level_domain" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Single-letter_second-level_dom...</a>

I&#x27;m curious as to how this 3-letter Twitter handle was heisted.

I just want to see a definition of done. What the hell does it even mean to “understand the true nature of the universe”?<p>What makes us think we can understand it?<p>How would we know if we could or could not?

Anyone use the original x.ai? The scheduling thing? I liked it!

Wasn&#x27;t X.ai a calendar-scheduling assistant back when non-LLM-based chatbots were, like, a hot thing in the Valley?<p>There&#x27;s some fucked up irony here that their domain name probably ended up being their most valuable piece of IP, and it gets bought up by Elon Musk to tout his...whatever the fuck this is.

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dEv99vxKjVI?t=1909" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dEv99vxKjVI?t=1909</a>

The question I have is how this technology will do the physical experiments to test hypotheses. Because it is not enough with the theory.

The question is whether they will start quitting once he asks them to guarantee his &quot;freedom of speech&quot; in the inferences.

Well, hopefully it doesn&#x27;t go the same way as &quot;Open&quot;AI, also started by Elon.

I remember grasping the &#x27;true nature of the universe&#x27; some night in a bar called &#x27;the professor&#x27; in the late 80&#x27;s. No, I&#x27;m not joking or being sarcastic. I wasn&#x27;t on any substances besides a mild dose of alcohol.<p>I just whish I could remember&#x2F; relive it rather than the tenuous grip of that moment I still preserve.

12 July 2023 = 12+7+23 = 42<p>42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

&gt; The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>… and then what?

yeah, I am going with Musk&#x27;s another FoMO, which he abandons as soon as a trend slowly fades away, anyone remember doge coin? yeah, exactly.

XAI : because understanding driving was too easy.

x.ai&#x2F;api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;answer<p>&quot;returns 42&quot;

&gt; The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe.<p>&quot;and if we make a few bucks along the way, hey, mission accomplished.&quot;

&quot;Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.&quot;<p>the same Elon Musk who dropped 44bn on Twitter and fought like a child to weasel out of the sale for almost six months? You mean that same sink-dragging guy who fired everyone once he took over at Twitter, locked everyone out of the office, and unbanned Andrew Tate and Kanye West?<p>People still let this guy &quot;lead&quot; anything?

there is no moat

An AI made to &quot;understand the true nature of the universe&quot;...<p>Not a word about physics, or mention of physicists in the team and this is led by Elon Musk, the man who think he can send persons to Mars by 2029. This looks so promising.

Why are there no women involved? (Please not trolling, I am curious.)