Billionaire Elon Musk said the founding of artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI was 'to understand the universe'. (Source: Getty)

In a 90-minute chat on the Twitter Spaces app on July 14, billionaire Elon Musk said the purpose of founding the artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI was "to understand the universe".

Mr Musk announced the creation of xAI on July 12, after accusing companies like OpenAI and Google of developing the technology without considering the risks to humans.

According to him, xAI will aim to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI) to replace Microsoft, Google and OpenAI and believes that AI can solve problems like humans.

During the conversation, Mr. Musk said xAI will work closely with his other companies like Twitter and Tesla.

xAI will use public tweets on Twitter to train AI models and may also collaborate with Tesla on AI software.

Such a partnership would be mutually beneficial and could boost Tesla's self-driving capabilities, Musk said.

xAI is a team of technology engineers and scientists in this field from US technology companies such as Google owned by Alphabet, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Advising the xAI company will be Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the risks posed by technology.

xAI's engineering team includes several people who have contributed to groundbreaking AI applications, such as AlphaStar (a new AI system from Google's DeepMind project) and GPT-4 (the latest version of OpenAI's language model).