Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images News
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk’s xAI has been in the spotlight this week, with the secretive artificial intelligence (AI) startup filing its first ever form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday.
The following is a timeline of notable events in xAI’s short history:
- March 22, 2023 – Musk, along with Apple (AAPL) co-founder and computer-industry legend Steve Wozniak and a handful of other tech officials, signed an open letter which called for a six month pause in the development of many AI tools in order to develop new safety standards for the technology.
- July 12, 2023 – “Announcing formation of xAI to understand reality,” Elon Musk tweeted. Following that, xAI’s official handle posted: “What are the most fundamental unanswered questions?” The company’s website said that it was working on building AI to “accelerate human scientific discovery” and that its mission was to advance the “collective understanding of the universe.”
- August 26, 2023 – xAI tweeted that it was hiring creators, teachers and curators to help improve its models.
- November 3, 2023 – Elon Musk told UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at an event at Lancaster House that he believed AI would likely make all jobs obsolete at some point in the future. Musk said: “There will come a point where no job is needed … “You can have a job if you want for personal satisfaction. But AI will be able to do everything.”
- November 5, 2023 – xAI unveiled Grok, its chatbot to rival Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI’s hugely popular ChatGPT. The company said that the AI was modeled after the science fiction comedy novels the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. xAI said the chatbot had been designed to answer “questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak.”
- November 6, 2023 – xAI launched xAI PromptIDE, an integrated development environment for prompt engineering and interpretability research. It was designed to help engineers and researchers explore the company’s large language models at pace, and allows users to implement complex prompting techniques.
- December 5, 2023 – xAI’s first filing to the SEC is a form D, in which the company said it was looking to raise up to $1B in an equity offering. The filing showed that xAI had raised raised $134.7M so far in equity financing from a total offering amount of $1B. The minimum investment accepted by any outside investor was listed at $2M.
- December 6, 2023 – Elon Musk denied that xAI was raising money “right now.” His comment came in a response to a tweet by a venture capitalist.
In addition to founding xAI, Elon Musk is also the founder of neurotechnology firm Neuralink. Additionally, Musk is the top boss of electric vehicle giant Tesla (TSLA), space transportation and exploration firm SpaceX (SPACE) and social media website X (formerly Twitter).