Elon Musk’s AI Ambitions – As Encapsulated by the New X.AI Corp. – Are Metastasizing Along With His Meme Game

After calling for a widespread pause on AI-related innovations to better examine the societal impact of this creeping innovation, Elon Musk has stealthily upped his own AI game. Apart from their obvious cross-synergies vis-à-vis Tesla’s Autopilot Advanced Driver-Assistance System (ADAS) and the Optimus bi-pedal robot, Musk’s AI ambitions do carry Orwellian undertones, given his absolute control over Twitter.

As we noted in a post last week, Elon Musk has poached talent from DeepMind – a subsidiary of the tech giant Alphabet – and purchased around 10,000 GPUs from NVIDIA to train a Large Language Model (LLM) on the pattern of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, Musk’s AI ambitions now appear to extend far beyond their original confines.

Recently, Elon Musk merged Twitter with a Nevada-registered holding company, X Corp. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal uncovered another company, bearing Musk’s favored X labeling and again registered in Nevada: X.AI Corp.

While details are extremely scant at the moment, the company’s name is illustrative of Elon Musk’s AI-related goals. As for Nevada, the state offers considerable statutory liability shields, hence its attractiveness for the CEO of Twitter and Tesla.

Bear in mind that Elon Musk has already declared that he intends to create an "everything app" under the tentative X labeling.

pic.twitter.com/kWMCqe1gz4

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2023

Meanwhile, the world's richest person continues to employ memes to connect with his followers. Sometimes, these memes are quite risqué, as illustrated in the tweet above.

Also the plot of Deus Ex pic.twitter.com/MhL5zLJQfn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 15, 2023

At other times, Elon Musk uses memes to enunciate his own world view about the supposed government excesses and authoritarianism.

To an ordinary person, this might appear to be a harmless albeit controversial expression of one's ideas. However, given the expansive social media reach of the owner of Twitter, coupled with his seemingly unbridled AI ambitions, the question emerges: is Elon Musk growing too powerful for his own good?

Written by Rohail Saleem