Key Points
- Elon Musk’s xAI has just raised $6 billion in the latest funding round.
- According to Musk, the Grok chatbot could become a serious ChatGPT competitor by the end of 2024.
xAI has just raised $6 billion in its latest funding round, according to the latest official reports. xAI is an American startup company founded by the tech mogul Elon Musk back in March 2023. The company’s goal is “to understand the true nature of the universe”.
In an official announcement, xAI revealed that the Series B funding round secured $6 billion and it featured the participation of important investors such as Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.
xAI managed to mark significant accomplishments during the past year. The company released Grok-1 on X in November 2023, and they released the enhanced version of the AI chatbot, called Grok-1.5 with long context capability. Grok-1.5V has image understanding.
With the official open-source release of Grok-1, xAI has paved the way for rapid advancements in various applications, optimizations, and extensions for the model.
According to the same notes, xAI will continue this fast-paced trajectory of progress over the coming months, with multiple updates and products on the waiting list.
The funds from this round will reportedly be used to take xAI’s first products to the market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies.
xAI is mainly focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for humanity.
Today, Musk announced via X that the pre-money valuation was $18 billion.
xAI’s boosts Musk’s ambitions in the AI industry
As Forbes recently noted, the tech mogul’s ambitions in the AI industry are boosted by the company’s latest achievements. His plan is reportedly to take on ChatGPT creator OpenAI and other companies such as Google and Anthropic.
In xAI’s official announcement, Musk issued a hiring call for AI devs, asking them to join his company if they believe in its mission of understanding the universe, which “requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political corectness.”
Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness https://t.co/jWEGDDnVk1
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 27, 2024
Musk recently accused OpenAI’s ChatGPT of being biased, woke, and politically correct, as noted by Forbes.
Musk was also a co-founder and early backer of OpenAI but his relationship with the company has soured in recent years.
Musk filed a lawsuit against the company and its CEO Sam Altman for undermining the original goal of developing an open-source artificial general intelligence that would “benefit humanity” in favor of maximizing profits.
Musk also attacked OpenAI’s chief rival Google, saying that the issues with its Gemini AI tool stemmed from the company being too woke and bureaucratic.
