SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI will release its first AI model to a select group on Saturday, the billionaire and Tesla CEO said on Friday.

This comes nearly a year after OpenAI's ChatGPT caught the imagination of businesses and users around the world, spurring a surge in adoption of generative AI technology.

Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015, but stepped down from the company's board in 2018.

"In some important respects, it (xAI's new model) is the best that currently exists," he said on Friday.

The billionaire who has been critical of Big Tech's AI efforts and censorship said earlier this year that he would launch a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe to rival Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI.

The team behind xAI, which launched in July this year, comes from Google's DeepMind, the Windows parent, and other top AI research firms.

Though Musk-owned X, the social media firm formerly known as Twitter, and xAI are separate, the companies work closely together. XAI also works with Tesla and other companies.

Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and a self-described close friend of Musk, said in September that xAI had signed a contract to train its AI model on Oracle's cloud.