It had all the makings of a typical recruiting event for a tech startup in San Francisco. There was free food, drinks, and live music generated via code . But there were also mandatory metal detector screenings, ID checks, and security guards everywhere.
It was held by Elon Musk at the original Mission District headquarters of OpenAI, which Musk cofounded before leaving after (reportedly) . And Musk was there to convince people to join his latest startup, xAI. The timing felt intentional.
That same day, OpenAI was hosting its annual Dev Day across town, where CEO Sam Altman had spoken hours earlier to a packed auditorium of developers. The Silicon Valley rumor mill was buzzing about OpenAI closing in on the largest round of funding ever for a startup, surpassing the amount Musk himself had just raised for xAI four months earlier. Around 8:30PM, the AI-generated music cut off, and Musk, surrounded by bodyguards, climbed onto a table in to address the room of engineers.
He began talking about why he started xAI and where he helped launch OpenAI nearly a decade ago. “We want to create digital superintelligence that is as benign as possible,” Musk said at the Tuesday gathering, according to a partial recording of his remarks shared with . He then called on those in the crowd “to join xAI and help build the intelligence and build useful applications to derive from that intelligence.
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