Elon Musk, who has hinted for months that he wants to build an alternative to the popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot, announced the formation of what he’s calling xAI, whose goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe.”

On a website unveiled Wednesday xAI said its team will be led by Musk and staffed by executives who have worked at a broad range of companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence, including Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft Corp. and Tesla Inc., as well as academic institutions such as the University of Toronto.

Musk was involved in the creation of OpenAI, the highest-profile AI startup and developer of ChatGPT. But he has frequently and publicly criticized OpenAI since he left the board in 2018, especially after it created a for-profit arm the following year. He has said he believes it to be “effectively controlled by Microsoft.”

The US inflation rate slid to a more than two-year low, a major step toward ending the cost-of-living emergency — and possibly the Federal Reserve’s historic monetary tightening, too.

At 3% last month, consumer-price inflation is now just one-third of the level it reached a year ago, which was the highest in four decades. And the details for June were also better than expected, with key measures of underlying inflation coming in below forecasts.

None of this means it’s game over in the fight against price pressures — especially for the Fed, which is widely reckoned to be locked-in to another interest-rate increase later this month. Still, there’s now a better-than-even chance that a July 26 hike, which would take the benchmark US rate to 5.5%, could be the last in quite a while.