Elon Musk says he wants to use his new AI company to answer scientific questions and understand 'what the hell is really going on'

• Elon Musk has a new AI company called xAI.
• The company launched last week with a mission to "understand the true nature of the universe."

Elon Musk has a new AI company, which has some pretty lofty aims.

After months of speculation, Musk's newest company xAI officially launched last week with a mission to "understand the true nature of the universe."

Musk, who expanded on this aim during a Twitter Spaces on Friday, said the company planned to tackle unknown scientific questions and generally attempt to understand "what the hell is really going on."

The billionaire said one of the company's main goals was to build an AI that could help answer "unresolved questions" including those around dark matter, dark energy, aliens, and gravity.

Musk added that the overarching goal of the company was to build a "good AGI" that is "maximally curious" and "truth-seeking."

The Tesla CEO has been a vocal critic of OpenAI, a company he cofounded and a frontrunner in the race to create artificial general intelligence (AGI). Musk has bashed the company's viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, claiming that some of the responses are biased.

Musk has been vocal about AI safety for years and has ramped up this rhetoric in recent months. The billionaire even attempted to pressure leading AI labs to temporarily pause the development of advanced models.

During the Spaces discussion, Musk acknowledged he had spent many years "worrying about AI safety" and used the event to encourage regulation and industry cooperation on the subject.

A wave of experts have joined Musk in warning about the potential dangers of advanced AI as some tech companies move closer to creating models that are as smart or smarter than average human intelligence.