Billionaire businessman Elon Musk is planning to announce a new generative artificial intelligence start-up to rival Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, according to a news media report on Friday.
Mr Musk is building a team of AI researchers and engineers, and he is also in talks with various investors in his other ventures, such as SpaceX and Tesla, about pumping capital into his new AI start-up, British daily newspaper Financial Times reported.
“A bunch of people are investing in it … it’s real and they are excited about it,”a person with direct knowledge of the talks said in a quote to FT.
Mr Musk, co-founder and chief executive of the world’s biggest electric vehicle maker Tesla, has ordered “thousands of high-powered GPU (graphic processing unit) processors” from technology company Nvidia, it added.
GPUs are sophisticated chips capable of running many tasks simultaneously. They're necessary in building generative AI’s large language models that can produce humanlike writing or lifelike images and videos.
Mr Musk, who cofounded the California-based start-up OpenAI in 2015, left its board in 2018 following disagreements with the company's direction.
He has also been critical of the company in recent months, arguing that OpenAI is placing several safety nets to prevent ChatGPT from offering results that might be divisive or offend its users.
Generative AI uses machine learning to produce content such as text, images, video and audio. It can generate novel content, in the right context, instead of merely analysing or acting on the existing data.
The global generative AI market is expected to reach $188.62 billion by 2032, growing at an annual rate of more than 36 per cent from $8.65 billion last year, according to a report by Brainy Insights. The North American region dominated the market in 2022.
Generative AI could also drive a seven per cent — or almost $7 trillion — increase in the global economy and lift productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over a 10-year period, Goldman Sachs estimated.
Mr Musk has reportedly hired Igor Babuschkin, who recently left DeepMind AI, to lead a group of AI researchers in the endeavour. He is hiring engineers from top AI labs, including DeepMind, FT reported, quoting people with knowledge of his plans.
Mr Musk’s potential entry to the disruptive generative AI industry will add yet another venture to his diverse set of businesses and investments.
The Wall Street Journal also reported on Friday that Mr Musk filed paperwork to start an AI company called X.AI Corp.
He bought microblogging site Twitter for $44 billion in October. He has also cofounded $137 billion rocket maker SpaceX, a neurotechnology research company Neuralink, and founded The Boring Company, an infrastructure and tunnel construction services start-up.
Last week, he reportedly merged Twitter with one of his companies called X Corp. Although Twitter will still function as a social media platform, this could be the entrepreneur's first step towards transforming the company into an “everything app”, similar to China’s WeChat.
The FT report said that his new AI start-up will be a separate entity and he could use Twitter content as data to train its language model and harness Tesla technologies for computing resources.
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
