US entrepreneur Elon Musk has announced the launch of an AI startup, xAI, that he says will take a new approach to making the technology safe.
The Twitter owner and Tesla and SpaceX CEO unveiled xAI on Wednesday, tweeting that it would seek "to understand reality".
"The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe," a short statement on the company's website said.
"Best thing" for AI safety
News agency Reuters reported that in a Twitter Spaces event held late on Wednesday, Musk suggested that the idea behind xAI was to build an AI that is made safer by its own curiosity, as opposed to being programmed to have morality ? a process referred to as alignment.
"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," he said. "I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity."

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Musk has hired several engineers who previously worked at ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Google for xAI. The two companies are working to develop artificial general intelligence ? meaning an AI model that is able to complete any intellectual task that a human can.
Staff have worked on "some of the largest breakthroughs in the field"
The xAI website lists 12 staff including Musk, all of whom are men, ...