Young Innovators Reject Musk’s Multi‑Million‑Dollar Offer, Launch AI Start‑Up Aiming for AGI

Young Innovators Reject Musk’s Multi‑Million‑Dollar Offer, Launch AI Start‑Up Aiming for AGI
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Two 22-year-old AI researchers, William Chen and Guan Wang, have declined a lucrative multimillion‑dollar recruitment offer from Elon Musk’s xAI in order to develop their own AI architecture — a bold decision that has drawn international attention, Fortune reported.

Chen and Wang first gained notice for creating a compact large‑language model (LLM) called OpenChat, which was trained on a carefully curated set of high‑quality conversations and refined using reinforcement learning (RL), rather than the massive internet data sets commonly used by leading AI labs.

Impressed by their early success, Musk’s xAI extended an attractive offer — a multimillion‑dollar contract — to bring them aboard. Instead, the duo opted to retain full control over their work and focus on building what they believe could overcome the fundamental limitations of transformer‑based AI. “We decided that large‑language models have their limitations,” Chen told reporters.

Since departing from OpenChat, Chen and Wang founded Sapient Intelligence, a start‑up focused on developing a “brain-inspired” reasoning system rather than simply scaling up model size. Their first test of this architecture — a prototype framework with only 27 million parameters — reportedly outperformed leading AI models from major labs on a series of abstract-reasoning benchmarks including complex puzzle solving, maze navigation, and AGI-style tasks.

The team argues that their approach — emphasizing efficient reasoning and structural innovation — may represent a more promising route to “AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence) than ever-larger neural networks. They said they are now preparing to scale up the system, open a U.S. office, and seek additional funding.