The AI in Musk's hand is just for storytelling?

Produced | Tiger Sniff Technology Group Author | Qi Jian Editor | Liao Ying

In the early morning of July 13, Beijing time, Musk announced his new company x.AI on his Twitter official. The main visual of the new company website clearly reads: "Understand the Universe".

Prior to this, Musk had repeatedly tweeted that OpenAI had deviated from its original intention, and criticized some research directions of general artificial intelligence (AGI). However, in April this year, the Wall Street Journal first broke the news that Musk had registered “x.AI” in Nevada, triggering industry speculation. Is Musk really not optimistic about AGI? Is he going to join the battle of large language models (LLMs)?

Now, those rumors about x.AI are finally confirmed. Whether this new AI company will work on the hot LLMs or AGI is still up in the air.

At present, in addition to reprinting Musk's official announcement on the establishment of the company, x.AI's official Twitter has only sent a tweet: ** "What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?" (What are the most fundamental unanswered questions? ?)"**

Among the twelve founding employees, two Asian scientists emphatically mentioned "mathematics" in Twitter. Although mathematics is the core of AI algorithms, such an emphasis reminds people of the research direction of x.AI Perhaps there will be a close connection with mathematics.

I really don't like LLMs

Under the upsurge of ChatGPT, the market has almost devoted all its attention to AI to LLMs. But in recent years, LLMs are not the only technologies that have made major breakthroughs in the field of AI research. **AI for Science's research has made major breakthroughs in scientific computing, nuclear physics, and biopharmaceutical research. **

The "understanding of the universe" proposed by x.AI and the key "mathematics" drawn by the founding employees seem to indicate that the company is going in the direction of AI for Science, rather than the LLMs that everyone is pursuing.

For a long time, Musk's main investment in the field of artificial intelligence has been in Tesla's autopilot. The "Optimus" humanoid robot, which will debut on Tesla AI Day in 2022, demonstrates Musk's future AI plans and greater ambitions for the AI market.

**Originally according to the current progress, fully automatic driving can be realized step by step, and embodied intelligence can be gradually developed, and Tesla's position in the AI "jianghu" is currently unshakable. **But just 2 months after Optimus came out, ChatGPT was born, and it was in the limelight for a while. However, at this time, the development of Tesla's fully autonomous driving (FSD) is not ideal. On the one hand, the price of the FSD system is close to 1/3 of the price of the complete vehicle, and the high price makes it difficult for many consumers to accept it. On the other hand, the safety of FSD in the United States has also been questioned by many parties. In early 2023, Tesla announced a recall of 363,000 electric vehicles equipped with FSD driver assistance systems in the United States.

In terms of embodied intelligence, shortly after ChatGPT exploded out of the circle, OpenAI announced to invest in a humanoid robot company "1X". With the support of ChatGPT, 1X's humanoid robot is obviously "more fragrant" than Tesla's Optimus .

Even so, **Musk does not seem to want to join the battle of LLMs. Instead, he has publicly criticized people's pursuit of AGI on various occasions, and even took the lead in signing a joint letter to boycott "giant AI research".

As an early investor of OpenAI, it is normal for Musk, who did not accompany OpenAI to stick to it, to have some "sour grapes" towards OpenAI. However, **Musk's resistance to LLMs really seems to be because he was not optimistic about this technology from the beginning. **

In fact, Tesla has always been one of the companies that invest the most in the field of artificial intelligence in the world, and its self-driving FSD is also one of the most successful companies in the commercial application of AI. But Musk's attention to AI seems to be focused only on autonomous driving.

In the past five years, almost every year Musk has publicly stated that "full autonomous driving will be realized soon." However, judging from the current performance of Tesla's fully autonomous driving business, whether Musk's prediction can be realized is still unknown.

In July 2022, Andrej Karpathy, a big bull in the AI industry, resigned as the head of Tesla's AI and autonomous driving department. This move was considered by the outside world at the time, which may be due to the disagreement between Andrej and Musk in the development of autonomous driving.

Andrej has been in charge of Tesla's artificial intelligence research since 2017. He has been involved in deep learning and CV research in the field of autonomous driving. Although Andrej studied under Fei-Fei Li of Stanford University Vision Lab during his Ph.D., his main field is not only computer vision. His research direction is: Convolutional/Recurrent Neural Networks and their applications in Computer Vision (CV), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and their intersections.

Half a year after Andrej left, at the beginning of 2023 when ChatGPT was the hottest, he officially announced that he joined OpenAI. This action seems to be a statement: **I am more optimistic about LLMs. **

From this, we boldly guess that maybe Andrej also persuaded Musk to increase investment in LLMs at the beginning, but unfortunately **Musk is really not optimistic about LLMs, he only likes automatic driving. **

Musk needs a new story

Although Musk and his x.AI have not yet clearly disclosed the business direction, whether they want to do AI for Science or not, x.AI will be the protagonist of the story for Musk in the next period of time.

The Optimus robot demonstrated at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference

Musk, who has always been the "real version of Iron Man", has always been a "story king", starting from Tesla, Musk's company has focused on the most cutting-edge technology that may change the future of mankind, autonomous driving , Immigrating to Mars, and Humanoid Robots.

Last year, spending a lot of money to buy Twitter seems to have become a failure of Musk's senior personality. Immediately after Musk acquired Twitter, he laid off employees on a large scale, causing panic and complaints in the company. This move has also directly produced a series of adverse effects on Twitter's daily operations, leading to a sharp decline in the confidence of the entire market in Twitter.

According to research firm Insider Intelligence, Twitter’s advertising revenue in 2023 may be US$2.98 billion, lower than the US$4.74 billion forecast in October 2022. The main reason is that advertisers don’t trust Musk.

To make matters worse, in addition to declining advertising revenue, Twitter also faces a huge threat from new competitors. Threads, which Meta has just released, has grown to 100 million users within 5 days of its launch, which is more than ten times faster than ChatGPT, which was previously hyped by the media. Meta's pressing step by step also made Musk become a little anxious, and even threatened on Twitter to have a live PK with Meta founder Zuckerberg.

Although Twitter is a private company owned by Musk, there are no shareholders from Wall Street who are directly accountable. However, when Twitter was first purchased, it was reported that Musk did not pay for it entirely out of his own pocket. Therefore, **Twitter’s current operating conditions are likely to be affecting Twitter. Musk's business reputation. **

From this point of view, today's CEO Musk is in great need of a new business story. ** On the one hand, it must be able to enhance the personality of "Iron Man" in the field of future technology, on the other hand, it must have enough room for development and future commercial value.

x.AI and its theme of "Understanding the Universe" fits this "Need for a Story". On the one hand, it is related to the current AI hotspots, and there is huge room for "hype". On the other hand, "Understanding the Universe" seems to be closely related to AI for Science, does not emphasize AGI and LLMs x.AI skillfully avoids the part of the market that is over-hyped, also provides room for imagination for future commercial value .

At the same time, Musk is also very clear in terms of business design. The x.AI official website shows that the new company will be independent of Twitter and Tesla’s parent company X corp, fundamentally clearing up the relationship between the new company and Musk’s other businesses, leaving room for the “failure” of the new business .

Judging from Musk’s past experience, whether it’s Tesla’s autonomous driving or SpaceX’s space exploration, although they have not yet reached the ultimate goal of the two companies, it does not prevent Musk’s fame and fortune on the “Road to Discovery” Double income. From the current point of view, the emergence of ChatGPT makes Tesla's latest technology story "Optimus" less attractive. Musk urgently needs to add a "new chapter" like x.AI to add points to the story of "Iron Man" .

On July 19th, Tesla will announce its second quarter financial report for 2023, announcing the news of the establishment of x.AI a week before the release of the financial report. I don’t know if Musk has designed other careful ideas in choosing the date.