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whip bull report, october 4 news, according to foreign reports, this is the entire content of a typical recruitment activity of a technology startup company in san francisco. there's free food, drinks, and live music generated by code written in real time.

but there are mandatory metal detector checks, id checks and security guards everywhere. the meeting was held at openai's original mission district headquarters with elon musk, a co-founder of openai who later (reportedly) left after failing to take over. musk is there to convince people to join his latest startup, xai.

the timing seems intentional. on the same day, openai was in town for its annual developer day, where ceo sam altman had just hours earlier addressed an auditorium packed with developers. rumors are swirling in silicon valley that openai is about to receive its largest funding round ever, surpassing the amount musk himself raised for xai four months ago.

around 8:30 p.m., the ai-generated music stopped, and musk, surrounded by bodyguards, climbed onto a table in a separate area to address a room full of engineers. he started talking about why he started xai, moving it into the same office where he helped start openai nearly a decade ago.

"we want to create digital superintelligence that is as harmless as possible," musk said at tuesday's rally, according to a partial recording of musk's speech shared with the verge.

he then called on the crowd to join xai, help build intelligence and build useful applications to leverage that intelligence.

for about an hour and a half, musk fielded questions from the mostly male audience, according to attendees. he said he believes we will achieve artificial general intelligence (agi) within a few years; he hopes to build a supersonic jet company next; he plans to open source the xai model about nine months after its release; and most importantly , he wanted to move quickly.

he compared the development of xai to the sr-71 blackbird, an aircraft that flew three times the speed of sound and provided the united states with enemy information during the cold war.

according to a post on x by an attendee, musk told the audience that the sr-71 blackbird reconnaissance aircraft has never been shot down and has only one strategy: accelerate.

he predicts that openai, anthropic, google, and xai will be the major players in the artificial intelligence race over the next five years. one attendee said that the purpose of this gathering was to find engineers for the xai api. ultimately, he said he wants xai to be as dominant in artificial intelligence as spacex is in rocketry.

firefighters concluded their hiring drive at 10 p.m. musk quickly left through the back door, escorted by security personnel. attendees, including some carrying openai backpacks, walked into the night carrying pizza slices.

artificial intelligence that maximizes and seeks truth

xai was founded in march 2023 on the 10th floor of musk’s social media platform x (formerly twitter).

the verge understands that he assembled a team that included employees from other companies such as tesla and spacex, as well as his 17-year-old son, cousins ​​and the son of jared birchall, who runs the family office. their mission: surpass openai and deliver competitive large-scale language models in just three months.

since then, xai has expanded from one floor at x to a larger office on the stanford research campus in palo alto. musk hired former google deepmind researcher igor babuschkin to lead xai. he also recruited researchers from openai, microsoft and meta.

in may of this year, xai received us$6 billion in financing from well-known investors such as andreessen horowitz, lightspeed venture partners and sequoia capital, with the company valued at us$24 billion. investors in

under pressure from musk, xai's first model was launched in late 2023 through grok, a chatbot for x paying subscribers.it has since released three updates: grok-1.5, grok-2, and grok-2 mini. but unlike competitors who had ample time to develop their own systems, xai’s lean team had to move quickly and find quick solutions.

one 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 still relies on outside technology to implement grok's core functionality. just over a month ago, xai announced a deal with black forest labs to power image generation. the feature doesn't have the guardrails other image generators put in place, allowing people to generate photos of anything from taylor swift in her underwear to kamala harris holding a gun.

musk said at x that xai is developing its own generator, but the partnership with black forest will allow it to launch one in grok more quickly.

a person familiar with xai's work told the verge that voice and search capabilities are in development.the idea is that, like openai and meta's voice modes, grok will be able to reply to speech. musk also wants it to provide summaries of news stories and trending topics shared on x.

musk is now grappling with fierce competition in the ai ​​field for top engineering talent and gpus. as the world's richest man, money is no problem for him - although x's plummeting value has put a financial strain on him. while he's raised billions for xai, musk doesn't need to create a profitable ai company anytime soon -- beating out runaway rival openai seems satisfying enough for him.

musk co-founded openai with ceo sam altman and a group of partners in 2015, but quit the board of directors just three years later. at the time, he said tesla was focused on artificial intelligence and that there could be conflicts in the future.

later, he claimed that he resigned due to disagreements with the openai team. in march, he sued the company, accusing it (rather dubiously) of breaching its contract with him and abandoning its mission. in response, openai shared emails between its leadership and musk, revealing a power struggle in which musk planned to monopolize the company.

"for obvious reasons, i don't trust openai," musk said at the job fair. "it is a closed artificial intelligence that pursues maximum profits."

the spat between musk and openai has turned into a bitter rivalry. this week, openai raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation, slightly more than musk's historic funding round.

musk has built a data center nicknamed giant using tesla's gpus, and it was reported that 100,000 advanced nvidia chips came online last week. altman, meanwhile, is on a global mission, meeting with uae leaders, asian chipmakers and u.s. officials to raise $7 trillion for 36 semiconductor factories and data centers, all in an effort to advance openai's use of agi’s pursuit.

after altman's latest funding round, he reportedly asked backers not to invest in competitors such as xai.

securing top ai talent in silicon valley may be as difficult as securing funding or computing power. the best researchers can easily make millions, and now is the perfect time for them to launch their own startups. many people have their own altruistic vision for the future of artificial intelligence, and they often choose companies based on their mission and leadership. while musk's fame and bold vision give him an advantage, that doesn't mean the battle for talent will be any easier.

so musk gathered hundreds of young engineers from rivals openai and deepmind — some of whom had just attended rival developer conferences that day — to do what he does best: sell his vision for the future.

in musk's world, agi is not controlled by companies like openai or google, which keep their best models secret. rather, it is owned by him and shared with the world.

one potential attraction of working at xai may be the opportunity to move faster and take greater risks compared to larger competitors such as openai. xai's smaller team and shorter product timelines provide the opportunity to innovate quickly, unlike larger, more cautious companies like openai and google. it may appeal to those eager to see rapid adoption of artificial intelligence or aligned with musk’s techno-libertarian leanings — those who reject silicon valley’s wokeness in favor of a super-hardcore work environment that prioritizes ambition and agility sex, not corporate security.

musk said at the job fair: i personally believe that the best way to achieve artificial intelligence safety is to have artificial intelligence that maximizes and pursues the truth.

like many things at musk's company, the event moved quickly.

a source who attended the party said: "he said he came up with the idea for the event last wednesday, when there was no furniture in the office.

but the source said it was an overall relaxed event focused on answering questions about artificial intelligence and musk's many other ventures. another source said: elon is committed to winning and accelerating the development of xai.