Yesterday, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk officially announced his own artificial intelligence (AI) company, dubbed xAI. “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” the company wrote on the homepage of its website.

Helmed by Musk – who's also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of Twitter – xAI has been staffed by a litany of prominent AI researchers who have previously served at industry-leading companies like Microsoft, Google and DeepMind.

"There's no question Musk is a publicity machine, but [xAI] is still worth marketers paying attention to thanks to the pedigrees of the people involved," says Mike Kaput, chief content officer at the Marketing AI Institute.

At the moment, little is known about what xAI actually intends to build. But according to multiple reports, it intends to compete directly with OpenAI, the San Francisco-based start-up which launched the uber-popular AI chatbot ChatGPT in November.

Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but resigned from the board in 2018, citing disagreement with the company’s 2019 decision to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company, which since that time has been receiving significant financial backing from Microsoft. Since his departure from OpenAI, Musk has repeatedly voiced his disdain for the company. In March, for example, he tweeted: “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it 'Open' AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all."