Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of Twitter, has announced his latest venture, xAI, the goal of which is to “understand the true nature of the universe.”

Led by Musk and advised by Dan Hendrycks — who currently serves as the Centre for AI Safety’s Director — the founding team behind xAI consists of 12 people who have previously worked at companies such as DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Tesla.

In their previous roles, members of the founding team have worked on and led advancements in artificial intelligence including OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, as well as contributing methods that are commonly used in the field.

In a tweet, co-founder Greg Yang said that xAI “will enable everyone to understand our mathematical universe in ways unimaginable before,” and that “developing the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks will be central to taking AI to the next level.”

Speaking on how xAI aims to balance risk of AI with the promise of the technology, Musk said “If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” and that “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”

More details of the new venture are set to be discussed in an upcoming Twitter Spaces session tomorrow, 14 July.

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In April of this year, Musk said he was going to “start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

However, xAI is not the first artificial intelligence company he has founded: he was a co-founder and early funder of OpenAI, which launched in late 2015. He cut ties with the company three years later.

According to Semafor, people familiar with the matter said ties were severed after CEO Sam Altman and the other co-founders declined Musk’s proposal to take over the company and run it himself.

In a bid to make progress on its mission of understanding the “true nature of the universe,” the newly launched AI company said that it will work closely with Twitter, Tesla, and other companies.