X Marks The Spot | Issue #17
Hello,
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in a hostile takeover, and rebranded it to X, he discovered that it was really a goldmine.
For today's issue, I have pieced together a minimalist story of how Musk may have the edge in the ongoing AI wars from news updates, interviews, leaks and his recent biography.
Read on.
Since serious research into AI started in the 1950s, there have been a series of troughs.
There'd be times of sensationalised confidence and over-hyped predictions. Then, there'd be disappointing AI winters—where unlike AI summertime, research progress would be sluggish, VC investing would be conservative and startups would be far and in between.
During the 2010s, things started picking up a bit. This time, AI was seeing real and practical usage. From text completion, speech-to-text and text-to-speech recognition to virtual assistants like Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri.
Chess prodigy, Demis Hassabis had founded a startup to ensure AGI was developed. It was called DeepMind. After suggesting to Elon Musk that he added AI to his list of existential threats at a conference meetup, Musk invested in DeepMind.
Elon Musk reached out to Google's Larry Page and pitched ideas to stop AI from killing us all. Page called Musk a specist for believing human intelligence is more important than other types of intelligence, saying that artificial intelligence was the necessary next step of evolution that may overshadow humans.
After a failed attempt at foiling Page's acquisition of DeepMind, Musk and Page's relationship soured.
Incensed and vowing never to let someone like Page control the trajectory of AI, Elon Musk founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others as a not-for-profit research startup to develop AI safely and make it public for anyone to use.
Some time down the line, Musk fails to convince the OpenAI board to fold into Tesla to use AI to develop autonomous EV vehicles.
Following the clash of interests building proprietary AI software, like Teslabot, at Tesla and fronting open-source AI at OpenAI, Elon Musk left the board.
In a twist, OpenAI under Altman, launched a for-profit arm and received billions from Microsoft in a partnership that'd allow Gates's brainchild first-use access to OpenAI's products.
Well, while railing against Big Tech and Altman, Musk was also negotiating terms to buy Twitter, the world's most up-to-date news engine.
Despising the platform's censorship and believing in free speech as the foundation of democracy, Elon Musk bought the platform and rebranded it to X in line with his vision to also build X into a financial infrastructure as he had earlier envisioned in his early years at PayPal.
It seems as "X marks the spot" on treasure maps, Elon Musk came to find that X had enough data to train an AI model that understands the world better with its constant influx of user-generated data (c. 500M posts per day).
Fearing Big Tech dominance of AI, Elon Musk founded his own AI company, xAI Corp and some days ago, they launched a humorous chatbot, named Grok, which is trained on X's data (posts, replies).
In tomorrow's issue, I'll discuss in some more detail, what this really means: the stakes, the competition and the skirmishes from competing startups on the AI-scape.
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And see you tomorrow.
With love and ink,
Emmanuel
This is wonderful, at least I have an insight into the dispute among Open AI shareholders
Do you have sources for this? It’s fascinating stuff and I’d like to do more research on it.