It had all the makings of a typical recruiting event for a tech startup in San Francisco. There was free food, drink and live music created through code written in real time.
But there were also mandatory metal detector checks, identity checks and security guards everywhere. It was held by Elon Musk at the original OpenAI headquarters in the Mission District, which Musk founded before leaving after (reportedly) failing to get it. And Musk was there to convince people to join his latest startup, xAI.
The timing felt intentional. That same day, OpenAI was hosting its annual Dev Day across town, where CEO Sam Altman had spoken hours earlier to an auditorium packed with developers. The Silicon Valley rumor mill was buzzing about OpenAI closing the largest funding round ever for a startup, surpassing the amount Musk had just raised for xAI four months earlier.
Around 8:30 p.m., the AI-generated music stopped and Musk, flanked by bodyguards, climbed a table in a partitioned area to address the engineers’ room. He started talking about why he started xAI and moved it to the same office where he helped launch OpenAI nearly a decade ago.
“We want to create digital superintelligence that is as good as it can possibly be,” Musk said at Tuesday’s meeting, according to a partial recording of his remarks shared with threshold. He then called on those in the crowd to “join xAI and help build intelligence and build useful applications to draw from that intelligence.”
For about an hour and a half, Musk took questions from the (mostly male) audience, according to people in attendance. He said he believes we will reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) in a few years; he hopes to build a “supersonic jet company” next; it plans to open-source the xAI models approximately nine months after they are released; and most importantly, he wants to move fast. He compared xAI’s growth to the SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that flew three times the speed of sound and provided the US with intelligence on the enemy during the Cold War.
“No SR-71 Blackbird ever crashed, and there was only one strategy: to accelerate,” Musk told the room over an X post by an attendee.
He predicted that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI will be the main players in the AI race for the next five years. The purpose of the party was to find engineers for xAI’s API, one attendee said. Ultimately, he said he aspires for xAI to be as dominant in AI as SpaceX is in rocketry.
At 22:00, the fire department ended the recruitment event. Musk was quickly escorted out a back door with his security detail. Attendees, including some wearing OpenAI backpacks, left the night with slices of pizza.
The ultimate truth-seeking AI
xAI was launched in March 2023 on the 10th floor of the office of X, Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
He assembled a team drawn from his other companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, as well as his 17-year-old son, his cousins and Jared Birchall’s son, who runs his family office. of eve has learned The mission: overcome OpenAI and deliver a large competitive language model in just three months.
Since then, xAI has expanded from a single floor at X to a larger office at Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto. Musk tapped Igor Babuschkin, a former Google DeepMind researcher, to lead xAI. It also recruited researchers from OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta.
In May, xAI secured $6 billion in funding from several high-profile investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $24 billion. Investors in X own 25 percent of xAI, which benefits from the wealth of training data the social media platform produces every day.
Musk is still relying on outside technology for Grok’s key features
Under pressure from Musk, the first prototype of xAI was launched in late 2023 through Grok, a chatbot for paid X subscribers. It has since released three updates: Grok-1.5, Grok-2 and Grok-2 Mini. But unlike competitors who had the luxury of time to develop their own systems, xAI’s lean team had to move quickly and find a quick solution. A person familiar with the development of the first model described it as a patchwork product that relied on Microsoft’s Bing for search and Meta’s open-source Llama model for query rewriting.
Musk is still relying on outside technology for Grok’s key features. A little over a month ago, xAI announced an agreement with Black Forest Labs to power image production. The feature lacked the guardrails put in place by other image generators, allowing people to generate photos of everything from Taylor Swift in her underwear to Kamala Harris with a gun. Musk said at X that xAI was working on its own generator, but the Black Forest partnership allowed it to launch one at Grok sooner.
A person familiar with what xAI is working on says threshold that the voice and search functions are working. The idea is that, like OpenAI and Meta’s voice modes, Grok will be able to speak again. Musk also wants it to provide summaries of X-shared news and trending topics.
Musk is now facing stiff competition in the AI race for top engineering talent and GPUs. As the world’s richest man, money isn’t an issue for him, though — despite the financial pressure X’s plummeting value has created. While he’s raised billions of dollars for xAI, Musk doesn’t exactly need to build a profitable company. AI soon – for him, taking down its runaway rival OpenAI seems to be quite satisfying.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with CEO Sam Altman and a group of partners in 2015, but Musk stepped down from the board just three years later. At the time, he cited “potential future conflict” due to Tesla’s focus on AI. Later, he claimed that he left due to disagreements with the OpenAI team. And in March, he sued the company, claiming (rather dubiously) that it breached a contract with him and abandoned its mission. In response, OpenAI shared emails between its leadership and Musk that revealed a power struggle where Musk planned to take sole control of the company.
“I just don’t trust OpenAI for obvious reasons,” Musk said during the hiring party. “It’s closed, for maximum AI gain.”
The dispute between Musk and OpenAI has evolved into a fierce game of one-upmanship. This week, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation, just surpassing Musk’s historic funding round. Musk used Tesla GPUs to build a data center nicknamed “Colossus” and reportedly brought 100,000 advanced Nvidia chips online last week. Meanwhile, Altman is on a global mission, meeting with leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Asian chipmakers and US officials to raise $7 trillion for 36 semiconductor plants and data centers, all aimed at advancing the pursuit of OpenAI for AGI. After Altman’s latest funding round, he reportedly asked backers not to invest in competitors like xAI.
Perhaps as difficult as getting funding or computing power is securing top AI talent in Silicon Valley. Top researchers can easily earn millions and the time has never been better for them to launch their startups. Many are driven by their altruistic visions of the future of AI, making their choice of company often based on its mission and leadership. While Musk’s fame and bold visions give him an edge, that doesn’t mean the battle for talent is any easier.
So Musk gathered several hundred young engineers from rivals OpenAI and DeepMind — some fresh from attending his competitors’ developer conference that same day — to do what he does best: sell his vision of the future .
In Musk’s world, AGI isn’t controlled by companies like OpenAI or Google, who keep their best designs private. Instead, it is owned and shared with the world.
A potential draw to working on xAI, compared to a larger competitor like OpenAI, may be the opportunity to move faster and take bolder risks. With a small team and shorter product timelines, xAI offers a chance to innovate quickly, unlike larger, more cautious companies like OpenAI and Google. It could appeal to those eager to see the rapid spread of artificial intelligence or who align with Musk’s techno-libertarian leanings — people who reject the “wokeness” of Silicon Valley in favor of a “super hardcore” work environment that gives prioritizing ambition and agility over corporate safeguards.
“My personal belief is that the best way to achieve AI safety is to have a maximum, truth-seeking AI,” Musk said at the recruiting party.
Like many things at Musk’s companies, the event came together quickly. “He said he had the idea for the event last Wednesday and that the office was unfurnished then,” said a source who attended the party. But the source called it a “general cold event” focused on answering questions not only about AI, but also about many of Musk’s other enterprises. “Elon is committed to acquiring and accelerating xAI,” another source said.