A new artificial intelligence company, xAI, has been launched by Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO, and Twitter owner, with the goal of “understanding the true nature of the universe.” Musk’s team will share more details on Friday during a live Twitter Spaces chat, according to the company’s website.

Members of the xAI team are alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla, and have worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots. According to Musk, xAI is positioning itself to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which are behind popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude.

According to the Financial Times, Musk secured thousands of GPU processors from Nvidia to power a potential large language model. In a taped interview on Fox News Channel that same month, Musk detailed his plans for a new AI tool called “TruthGPT,” adding that he feared existing AI companies prioritized political correctness.

One of the AI startup’s advisors will be Dan Hendrycks, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that published a letter in May signed by tech leaders claiming that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority along with other societal risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

A number of academics and ethicists reacted to the letter, stating that too much focus on AI’s power and future threats distracts from the real-life harms that some algorithms cause to marginalized communities now, rather than in the future.

In order to take AI “to the next level,” xAI will explore the “mathematics of deep learning,” a facet of AI, as well as “the theory of everything” for large neural networks.

XAI was reportedly incorporated in Nevada by Musk in March. Twitter was previously called X Corp. in some financial filings, but xAI notes its separation from X Corp. on its website, adding that it will “work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to achieve our goals.”