Parmy Olson, Columnist

Elon Musk’s AI Dreams Are Going in Circles

Raising $1 billion for xAI brings Elon Musk back to square one, with an uphill battle ahead.

December 6, 2023 at 3:35 PM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

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When Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in late 2015, he pledged to fund the non-profit lab with $1 billion of his own money; he had safety in mind and hoped to counter Google’s stranglehold on AI research. That $1 billion never fully materialized, and Musk left OpenAI on bad terms.

Today he’s trying to back another AI company (his own) with another $1 billion (not his own), according to an SEC filing (although, confusingly, he tweeted on Wednesday they are “not raising money right now”). That not only puts Musk back where he started on AI, it illustrates a pattern among wealthy technologists who’ve been chasing the transformative technology for the past decade: Their worries about how it could hurt humanity tend to get put aside as the race to make their systems more powerful heats up.