AI Utilisation by Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the owner, CTO and executive chairman of X (formerly Twitter), founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX, founder of xAI, co-founder of Neuralink, the man behind Tesla and several other entrepreneurial ventures can be easily regarded as one of the important leaders in the field of artificial intelligence. The billionaire has been developing revolutionary AI technologies which can change the way we live and work in the near future.

Musk’s Neuralink has the potential to hugely improve the life of paralysed people, where these people in the future can be expected to operate robotic limbs and computers with their mind or even go for a walk through brain machine interfaces.

Abling with AI

Neuralink’s ultimate goal is to create a generalised input / output platform capable of interfacing with every aspect of the human brain. 

In service of this long-term goal, they have spent the last several years building a device intended to interface with various regions of the brain to solve debilitating brain and central nervous system ailments. The first indication they aim to address is the restoration of digital autonomy to people living with quadriplegia due to spinal cord injury (SCI) or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Neuralink has been currently seeking people with quadriplegia to participate in a groundbreaking investigational medical device clinical trial for its brain-computer interface.

In January of this year, Neuralink conducted the first human implantation of their brain-computer interface (BCI). They were able to detect the participant’s neural signals shortly after the implantation surgery, and since then, the person has used the end-to-end BCI system for various applications, like playing online chess. 

 Future of Commuting

Elon Musk is also geared to embark on the future road of commuting or transportation through the usage of AI. Tesla has the aim of creating autonomous self-driving cars, which is another futuristic AI powered innovation.

Even presently, Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time.

Tesla automobiles are already endowed with the technology for undertaking autonomous lane changes, self-parking, and GPS navigation for which they employ sophisticated neural net processing, radar, and ultrasonic sensors.

The futuristic AI powered vehicles of Tesla have the potential of not only making driving much less bothersome but can also reduce the number of road accidents.

xAI and Grok

Elon Musk’s latest venture, xAI, is dedicated to developing artificial intelligence aimed at speeding up human scientific breakthroughs. Their mission is to deepen our shared comprehension of the universe. While xAI’s professed goal is “to understand the true nature of the universe”, one of its immediate objectives is to  come up with an AI, which is capable of advanced mathematical reasoning.

On November 2023, xAI introduced  Grok, a generative AI chatbot integrated with X. In fact, Grok, which is based on a large language model(LLM), was developed by Musk probably in response to the amazing rise in popularity of ChatGPT from OpenAI, which Musk co-founded with Sam Altman in 2015. Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018.

Grok can bring a sea change in news consumption. X has introduced a new feature called Stories which utilises Grok to deliver precise summaries of trending stories. Stories is accessible only for X’s premium subscribers in the Explore section of the app. According to Alex Kantrowitz, the Founder of Big Technology, Grok synthesises news using AI to blend social posts and commentary, providing updated, accurate summaries.

Elon Musk’s exploration of AI to conquer many frontiers is expected to continue unabated. Recently, it was confirmed by Dell’s CEO on X that the company will be joining hands with Nvidia to build an AI factory for Elon Musk’s xAI. According to Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell, this initiative will also power Grok.

Handle AI with Caution

We can safely say that Elon Musk with his futuristic vision and AI tools has the potential to bring a significant change in our life and lifestyle across several verticals and lead us to an AI era. His application of AI can and should inspire other entrepreneurs also to explore the seemingly unimaginable potential of AI to create a better world for tomorrows.

However, Musk has also many a time warned about possible negative side of AI, which also the entrepreneurs and thought leaders of today and tomorrow must heed before indiscriminately using AI, for this genie is giving indication of the frightening possibility to be your master and to even replace you in the future!