Elon Musk has announced that his artificial intelligence lab, xAI, will open its new large-scale language model to a select group tomorrow; in a cryptic post to X, he claims it is "the best [model] that currently exists."

The world's richest man launched xAI in July, assembling a team of top engineers and AI scientists to "understand the true nature of the universe" through AI. This follows the growing success of OpenAI through its chatbot ChatGPT.

Musk was an early investor in OpenAI, but left the board in 2018 after apparent disagreements and a failed attempt to buy the company. He was also heavily invested in machine learning and AI through Tesla's self-driving car division at the time.

The billionaire has criticized the AI products, services, and research efforts of many of the big tech companies, arguing that there is too much emphasis on guardrails and controls. Earlier this year, he said he wanted to launch "AI for maximum truth."

In contrast to these lofty ambitions, Musk has also warned that AI poses an existential threat to humanity, saying that in the future it will put an end to labor and create a world in which "no work is needed. Whether this is due to his xAI research or just an opinion is not clear.

In addition to Musk himself, xAI includes engineers who have worked at Google's DeepMind, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Tesla. They have collaborated on some of the most important technologies behind modern AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard.

The new xAI model is expected to compete directly with OpenAI's GPT-4, Google's PaLM 2, and Meta's Llama 2, and much of the training will be done using Oracle's cloud network.

Musk is in the UK this week for the AI Safety Summit. During a live conversation on X with British Prime Minister Rishi Snack, he declared that AI could become "the most disruptive force in history."

He said: "If you wish upon a magical genie, it will grant you whatever you wish for, no nonsense like limiting yourself to three wishes, which is both good and bad. One of the challenges ahead is how to find meaning in life."

During his initial presentation in July, Mask expressed the view that it would be safer for a "truth-seeking superintelligence" to build with curiosity and concern for humanity because it would be more concerned with keeping humanity safe.

This is part of what he hopes to achieve with xAI, a way to understand the universe and build a "good AI." what form xAI will take, how those who are given permission to use it will access it, or how much this model will cost, not yet been clarified.