With Twitter in ruins, SpaceX's Starship program faltering, and Tesla under renewed scrutiny regarding the dangers of its Autopilot software, Elon Musk has his sights set on his next big venture.

This appears to be a serious enterprise. xAI's team consists of veterans from Deep Mind, Open AI, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. It is, of course, led by Musk and advised by Dan Hendriks, director of the Center for AI Safety, a group that in May asked someone to "do something about AI before we are totally fucked."

According to xAI's website, the new company is separate from X, which Musk founded earlier this year as a successor to Twitter, "but will work closely with X [Twitter], Tesla, and others to move forward on our mission."

Musk has previously muttered about wading into the muck of artificial intelligence; in April, he said he was working on TruthGPT, which he described as "a maximum truth AI that seeks to understand the nature of the universe." At the time, it was not entirely clear how serious he was, but apparently he is more committed to his AI project than to buying Twitter.

The xAI leadership team appears to be mostly a collection of respectable individuals in the field, though Musk himself has, unsurprisingly, sent what one might call politely mixed signals in that regard.

According to the xAI website, interested followers can "meet the team and ask questions" during a Twitter Spaces chat on July 14. As for why Musk revealed the company today, three days before the big online showcase, it seems to be essentially the same reason SpaceX insisted on announcing the Starship on April 20, even though the system was not fully ready: he was clever.