Elon Musk was reportedly working on his AI company while publicly calling for a pause on AI development

• All the while Elon Musk was calling for an AI development pause, he was building his own AI venture, The New Yorker reported Monday.
• Musk signed an open letter in March calling for a 6-month pause on training AI.
• Four months later, he announced his newest company: xAI.

While Elon Musk was publicly calling to "pause giant AI experiments" earlier this year, he was quietly building his own, according to a new report.

Musk was working on xAI during the time he and more than 1,000 other people, including AI experts, signed an open letter calling for a 6-month pause on AI development, according to an article published in The New Yorker on Monday.

During this period, Musk was poaching talent from competitors — including OpenAI, which he cofounded before departing its board in 2018 — and had been in contact with execs at Nvidia, a leading manufacturer of chips used for AI, the magazine reported, citing someone with knowledge of the conversation.

Musk also filed the registrations for xAI the same month the letter was circulated, according to The New Yorker.

In April, a month after the open letter was released, reports swirled that Musk had approached some AI researchers about potentially forming a new lab and that he was talking with Tesla and SpaceX investors about backing the effort.

Soon after, Musk confirmed he wanted to build something he calls "TruthGPT," which he described as "a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."

In July, Musk announced the formation of xAI, which loftily seeks to "understand the true nature of the universe," according to its website.

Musk did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.