Elon Musk's AI startup xAI has raised $6 billion in a new funding round, it said today, in one of the biggest deals in the red-hot emerging space as it raises capital to compete aggressively with rivals including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Googling.
Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding are among the backers who invested in xAI's Series B funding, the startup wrote in a blog post.
The funding confirms JS's April reporting that xAI was looking to raise $6 billion. xAI was closing the round that would have given it a valuation of $18 billion at the time, JS reported at the time. xAI, which started last year and emerged from social network X, and whether X had also invested.
Musk confirmed that the investment round was valued at $18 billion pre-money.
Musk is one of the first and most high-profile entrepreneurs in the field of AI. Tesla, a car company he leads, is the largest EV car manufacturer with self-driving technologies. He is also co-founder of OpenAI, a startup in which he has invested tens of millions of dollars. Musk's love for OpenAI has since waned: in March, he sued OpenAI and co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly betraying their mission and becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. He has also accused Google of it coding prejudice in its AI products.
After forming the xAI year, Musk released his chatbot ChatGPT rival Grok 1.0 model in November. The company later made the model available via a chatbot to Premium+ users – who pay $16 per month – on X. In April, the company released the new Grok 1.5 model and also gave Premium users on Additionally, the Musk-owned company previewed Grok's multimodal options in April. Earlier this year, the company made the Grok model open source, but without any training code.
xAI plans to use the funds from the new funding round to bring the first wave of products to market, build advanced infrastructure and accelerate research and development of future technologies, the report said. the blog post. The company will likely look for partnerships to introduce Grok to users outside of X.
The company claims it wants to develop “truthful” AI systems. Although Grok's news feed on X is reported to hallucinate and generate misleading information.
