Elon Musk laid out his vision for his AI startup xAI in a company-wide meeting where he told employees that he wanted to build systems that were “maximally truth-seeking” while also previewing plans to build a Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) competitor called Macrohard, The New York Times reported.
“We are the only company where the mission is truth,” Musk told his workers as part of an hour-and-a-half presentation that was listened to by The New York Times. “If you force the A.I. to lie or believe things that are not true, you’re at great risk of creating a dystopian future,” the report added.
The AI company’s chatbot Grok has reached 64 million monthly users, the report noted, citing a company leader.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
Since his falling out with President Donald Trump in June, the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO has redoubled his efforts with xAI, which was recently valued at $120B.
Musk has deemed government a hopeless problem, but he believes A.I. will revolutionize society. And he insists xAI can build technology that will eventually help his other businesses, like Tesla and SpaceX, the report added.
Over the summer, Musk spent most of his time at xAI’s offices in Palo Alto, California, working in all-day spurts that sometimes stretched into the next day, NYT added, citing people familiar with the company’s operations. Occasionally, as he has with his other companies over the years, Musk has slept at the office.
Musk’s focus on xAI raises questions about how much time he giving to his other companies, and comes as Tesla’s board of directors has been pushing to give him a trillion-dollar pay package, which they say will motivate him to improve the company’s performance, the report added. On Monday, Musk posted on X, “Daddy is very much home,” and detailed his schedule, which included 12 hours of meetings at Tesla and a visit to xAI’s data center.
Despite Musk’s focus on xAI, the company’s had a tough summer, the report added, citing interviews with 12 people with knowledge of the company’s operations.
Musk has revamped xAI on the fly. He has led an aggressive recruiting drive for engineers. And he has pushed out several prominent researchers, even as others have left because they thought xAI had abandoned science in favor of attention-grabbing products, like a chatbot which sometimes produced offensive material and flirty A.I. chat companions, the report added.
Simultaneously, xAI has is spending billions of dollars on technology while it is not known how much money it is generating. Musk and his executives said on Wednesday that Grok now has 64 million monthly users. ChatGPT gets about 700 million weekly users for OpenAI, the report noted
In addition, Musk has made predictions that xAI’s product would help quintuple advertising revenue to $10 billion a year at X, formerly Twitter, the report added.
In the meeting, Musk reiterated his commitment to creating a competitor to Microsoft, calling it “Macrohard” that would use Grok to create software as well as an A.I. product for children ages 2 to 12 called “Baby Grok,” the report noted.
Musk and his employees also noted the importance of xAI’s connections to Musk’s other companies, stating that Grok was already powering the voice of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, which are being developed to handle work inside factories and other businesses, according to the report.
Recently, Musk has publicly supported a Tesla shareholder proposal calling on the company to invest in xAI. Shareholders are slated to vote on the proposal in early November.
“This shareholder vote decides the future of Tesla and may affect the future of the world,” Musk said in a post on X on Thursday.
In recent months, several executives at xAI had left after clashing with two of Musk’s closest advisers over concerns about the AI startup’s management and financial health, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.