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Tesla and SpaceX chief Mr. Elon Musk is willing to go to jail if he believes that significant public interest might be harmed by a government request to his new company xAI. Musk made headlines earlier this month when he announced a new firm called xAI. While the firm's title is self-explanatory, its objectives are still being deliberated by a team of highly talented people who have spent quite some time at the leading edge of artificial intelligence. Musk and his xAI team shared their take on the direction that the new enterprise might take in the future in a Twitter space earlier today, where he also answered questions related to potential requests from the U.S. government under national security laws.

Elon Musk's xAI Seeks to Develop An Artificial Intelligence Platform That Might Itself Decide What Questions to Answer

If one word were to describe Mr. Musk's latest endeavor, it would be 'curiosity.' Despite its leader having set up and led some of the most successful firms in human history, xAI still reminds one of the early stages of a startup where a bunch of founders sit together and hash out ideas. This was also the theme during his Twitter space earlier today, where he and team members simply shared what they believe the firm's future direction will be.

The overarching purpose of xAI is to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI) model to understand everything. While they might sound similar on the surface, an AGI is considered to be a step above traditional AI. It is, as of now, a hypothetical technology that is capable of solving problems that are outside its training ambit, on its own. Artificial intelligence, in general, is simply an advanced mathematical technology that uses conclusions reached through a pre-existing data set to derive new answers in new domains.

An illustration of a machine learning model developed at MIT to solve math problems after training on courses. Image: MIT

A key "threshold" of this AGI will be to solve at least one critical problem to determine whether it can meet human intelligence at the very least. Building on his experiences at Tesla, Musk believes that creating an AGI will seem easy in retrospect. According to him, understanding the fundamentals of AGI can lead xAI to lesser brute forcing, a broad term for solving a problem by throwing resources at it. The platform will involve heavy computing, but the team will be small.

The conversation took an interesting turn in the question and answer sessions when a listener asked Musk how he would stop a takeover of his AGI by the "deep state." Musk responded by sharing that in the U.S., the robust legal system will be important in fighting against such 'takeovers,' but admitted that it is a risk that cannot be ignored. He added that the U.S. most likely has the best protections to limit government interference in nongovernmental organizations.

When further pressed on how the government can use national security laws to make companies meet demands, Musk shared:

Well, I mean there really has to be a really major national security reason to secretly demand things from companies. And, now, obviously it depends strongly on the willingness of that company to fight back against things like FISA requests. And, you know, at Twitter, or X Corp as it's now called, we'll respond to FISA requests but we're not going to rubber stamp it like it used to be. It used to be like anything that was requested, would just get rubber stamped and go through which is especially bad for the public. So, we'll be much more rigorous, and we are being much more rigorous in not just rubber stamping FISA requests and there really has to be a danger to public that we agree with and we will you know oppose with legal action anything we think is not in the public interest.

. . .So other citizens can raise the alarm bell and you know oppose government interference if we can break it to the public that we think something is happening that is not in the public interest.

Asked if he would even reveal national security requests that are not cleared for public revelation, he stated:

I mean it really depends on the gravity of the situation. I mean I would be willing to go to prison or willing to go prison if I think the public good is at risk in a significant way. You know, that's the best I can do.