Billionaire Elon Musk's AI Vision

Elon Musk - Ảnh 1. — Billionaire Elon Musk decided to invest heavily in xAI - Photo: AFP

On July 12, 2023, Mr. Musk announced the establishment of xAI, his own artificial intelligence start-up, with the goal of "understanding the true nature of the universe".

Exactly two years later, on July 12, the Wall Street Journal announced that SpaceX - the company in which he holds the majority of voting rights - agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI.

Spend big to compete

This is SpaceX's first direct investment in xAI and one of the company's largest outside of aerospace.

The investment is part of a $5 billion funding round for xAI announced by Morgan Stanley on July 1. In addition to the $5 billion in equity, Morgan Stanley also said it had raised another $5 billion for xAI from bonds and loans.

On July 13, Mr. Musk continued to announce that Tesla shareholders - his biggest golden goose - will vote on investing in xAI.

He did not specify the size of this investment but only affirmed on X: "I do not have full authority to decide (on investment - PV). If I had that authority, Tesla would have invested in xAI a long time ago. We will let shareholders vote on that issue."

With the above developments, the value of xAI will be raised to 113 billion USD. Of which, 33 billion USD is the value of social network X - which Mr. Musk merged into xAI in March to expand the reach of the Grok AI model and consolidate data, models, resources... between the two companies.

The continued capital increase comes just days after xAI launched its largest AI model - Grok 4 - on July 9. xAI puts Grok 4 in direct competition with "horny" model families such as GPT-4 (OpenAI), Claude 4 (Anthropic), Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google)...

Mr. Musk called his newly released "child" "the smartest AI in the world ." His claim was quickly verified when Grok 4 continuously surpassed its competitors in most of the famous AI model benchmarks, leading both in abstract reasoning and practical reasoning...

The user community itself has also received Grok 4 quite positively, although many still rate this model as slower and more resource-intensive than its competitors.

Bringing AI into the technology ecosystem

The continuous capital increase reflects Mr. Musk's ambition to bring xAI to catch up with leading AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic...

After a funding round earlier this year, OpenAI was valued at $300 billion. The Wall Street Journal even reported that the company was in talks to raise its valuation to $340 billion.

This more or less influenced the decision to spend lavishly by Elon Musk - once one of the co-founders of OpenAI.

AI experts are often broadly divided into two groups: those who encourage AI development as quickly as possible (boomers) and those who call for the technology to be developed cautiously, ensuring that AI does not go against the interests of users (doomers).

Mr. Musk has repeatedly made his “doomer” views public. In March 2023, he and many experts signed an open letter, calling on the world to suspend all AI development activities for at least 6 months to complete “safety barriers” for this technology.

The letter warned that if not careful, AI could bring about the “destruction of civilization.” However, this proposal was not listened to.

Less than four months later, he founded xAI to realize his own vision for the technology.

At that time, Mr. Musk affirmed that xAI would develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is superior to humans but also safer and friendlier to humanity by helping it focus on understanding humans themselves.

Musk's overall vision for Grok is to build a "unified AI framework" for his entire ecosystem of high-tech products.

Grok will be the central AI platform, connecting and sharing data between companies under his control, thereby promoting operational optimization and service personalization.

Grok is now deeply integrated into social network X, giving it access to some of the richest data and user bases in cyberspace.

Grok has also been included in the customer care system of the Starlink satellite internet service provided by SpaceX.

Tesla electric cars have also just "received" Grok through the July 2025 software update. Users can chat hands-free with Grok to ask for information, get advice or entertain themselves while driving.

Going forward, this AI model could be incorporated into Tesla's autonomous electric vehicle Robotaxi or humanoid robot Optimus or even SpaceX's spaceship Starship.

Grok controversial

The development of xAI and Grok has not been without its bumps. Earlier in July, just before the release of Grok 4, its predecessor Grok 3 was heavily criticized for its anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi responses.

Mr. Musk explained that Grok 3 had just been updated to "listen" to users too much, leading to some cases of giving controversial feedback like the above. This scandal was so big that X had to quickly suspend providing Grok to fix the error.

Grok 4 itself has also been questioned for its neutrality on many issues. When asked about some controversial issues such as immigration, abortion or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it seemed to "reference" Mr. Musk's public views on X.

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Source: https://tuoitre.vn/tam-nhin-ai-cua-ti-phu-elon-musk-20250715075140287.htm