July 12 (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, launched his long-teased artificial intelligence startup xAI on Wednesday, unveiling a team comprised of engineers from the same big U.S. technology firms that he hopes to challenge in his bid to build an alternative to ChatGPT.

The startup will be led by Musk, already the CEO of electric car maker Tesla (TSLA.O), CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX and owner of Twitter, who has said on several occasions that the development of AI should be paused and that the sector needed regulation. Musk has repeatedly voiced concerns about AI’s potential for “civilizational destruction.”

In a Twitter Spaces event Wednesday evening, Musk explained his plan for building a safer AI. Rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a “maximally curious” AI, he said.

“If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” Musk said. “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”

Musk also predicted that superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, will arrive in five or six years.

Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.

Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.

Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, gestures as he attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, France, June 16, 2023. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo

The websitefor xAI said it will hold a Twitter Spaces event on July 14.

The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at Google’s DeepMind; Tony Wu, who worked at Google <GOOGL.O>; Christian Szegedy, who was also a research scientist at Google; and Greg Yang, who was previously at Microsoft.