Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has raised $6 billion in a brand new investment spherical, it stated lately, in some of the greatest offers within the red-hot nascent house, as he shores up capital to aggressively compete with opponents together with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
Valor Fairness Companions, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Constancy, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Retaining are a number of the backers who’ve invested in xAI’s Collection B investment, the startup wrote in a weblog put up.
The investment confirms TechCrunch‘s reporting from April that xAI was once taking a look to lift $6 billion. xAI on the time was once finalizing the spherical that may have given it a valuation of $18 billion, TechCrunch reported on the time. xAI, which began simply remaining yr and has spun out of social community X, and whether or not X had additionally invested.
Musk showed that the funding spherical was once valued at $18 billion pre-money.
Pre-money valuation was once $18B— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Might 27, 2024
Musk is among the earliest and maximum high-profile marketers within the AI house. Tesla, a automotive corporate he leads, is the highest EV carmaker with self-driving applied sciences. He’s additionally a co-founder of OpenAI, a startup through which he has invested tens of thousands and thousands of greenbacks. Musk’s love for OpenAI has waned since: In March, he sued OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly betraying its project commentary and turning into a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. He has additionally accused Google of coding bias into its AI merchandise.
After forming xAI yr, Musk launched its chatbot ChatGPT-rival Grok 1.0 style in November. Later, the corporate made the style to be had thru a chatbot to Top rate+ customers — who pay $16 a month — on X. In April, the corporate launched the brand new Grok 1.5 style and in addition allowed Top rate customers on X to get entry to the chatbot. Moreover, the Musk-owned corporate previewed Grok’s multimodal features in April. Previous this yr, the corporate open-sourced the Grok style however with none coaching code.
xAI plans to deploy the price range from the brand new financing spherical to take its first set of goods to marketplace, construct complicated infrastructure, and boost up the analysis and building of long term applied sciences, it stated within the weblog put up. The corporate is prone to search for partnerships to introduce Grok to customers past X.
The corporate claims that it objectives to broaden “honest” AI techniques. Even though, Grok’s information abstract function on X is reported to hallucianate and generate deceptive knowledge.
