Elon Musk is reportedly planning an A.I. startup to compete with OpenAI, which he cofounded

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is planning to launch a synthetic intelligence startup that might go head-to-head with OpenAI, the Financial Times reported Friday.

Musk — the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter — has been constructing a crew of researchers and engineers and has been in dialog with a number of buyers, the Financial Times reported, citing sources acquainted with the matter. He has additionally reportedly been recruiting from different high AI corporations, together with Alphabet-owned DeepMind.

“It’s real and they are excited about it,” a supply acquainted with the matter informed the Financial Times.

Musk has secured hundreds of Nvidia GPU processors, in line with the report. Those chips are an integral a part of constructing a big language mannequin, or LLM, to compete with OpenAI’s GPT. Musk mentioned he was buying the processors for his corporations in a Twitter Spaces interview with the BBC this week.

“It seems like everyone and their dog is buying GPUs at this point,” Musk mentioned. “Twitter and Tesla are certainly buying GPUs.”

Musk was as soon as a significant monetary backer at OpenAI, committing $1 billion over a number of years, in line with an earlier report from Semafor. But Musk backed out of his monetary and operational commitments to the substitute intelligence agency on the identical time OpenAI added a for-profit business phase. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI shortly after Musk ruptured with the group and, earlier this 12 months, dedicated to a brand new multibillion-dollar funding.

Musk has publicly questioned ChatGPT-creator OpenAI’s strategy. In March, Musk signed an open letter calling for an instantaneous, six-month-long halt on any analysis on AI fashions extra superior than OpenAI’s GPT-4. He has mentioned AI is “one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization.”

Musk’s reported enterprise may turn out to be the most recent entrant to an more and more crowded area. Beyond Microsoft and Google, Amazon introduced Thursday that it is getting into the generative AI area.

Musk didn’t instantly reply to CNBC’s request for remark.

Read extra on the Financial Times.