Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, has announced the formation of a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup on Wednesday.

“Announcing formation of xAI to understand reality,” he wrote in a tweet. The announcement came despite his earlier call for the development of AI to be paused and that the sector needed regulation.

“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. You can meet the team and ask us questions during a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14,” the company said on its website on Wednesday.

“Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto,” xAI wrote.

“Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4,” it added.

xAI said the team is advised by Dan Hendrycks who currently serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety.

“We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission,” the company said. “We are actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers to join our team as members of our technical staff in the Bay Area.”

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and was an early backer of the company behind ChatGPT, but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.

Already the chief executive officer of electric car maker Tesla, CEO of rocket launch company SpaceX, Musk is also the owner of Twitter.

Earlier in March, Musk and more than 1,100 experts from the tech industry and academia have called for a six-month “pause” on the development of advanced AI systems such as OpenAI’s GPT, citing potential risks to society and humanity.

An open letter, published on Wednesday by a non-profit campaign group the Future of Life Institute, had been signed by more than 1,100 individuals from the tech and academia-industry.

“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT- This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” the letter then stated.

Elon Musk, tech experts call for ‘pause’ on advanced AI systems