Elon Musk’s AI business, xAI, has secured $6 billion in a fresh investment round, the company said today, as Elon Musk builds up money to fight vigorously with competitors such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Alphabet.
According to the startup’s blog post, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding are among the investors in xAI’s Series B fundraising round.
The funding confirms TechCrunch’s April story that xAI was trying to raise $6 billion with a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. aise $6 billion with a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. At the time, TechCrunch stated that Elon Musk made sure that X, the social network he currently owns and controls, holds a share in xAI and would profit from whatever growth the AI business sees.
Perhaps one of the most powerful persons on earth and an entrepreneur as well as a business magnate, Elon Musk was co-founder of Zip2 and then co-founder of X.com that would eventually grow into PayPal. In 2002, he founded SpaceX to make humanity a multi-planetary species by enabling easy and reliable access to space. In addition, Musk joined Tesla, Inc. and played a pivotal role in making electric vehicles, power solutions for your home, and renewable energy.
Apart from these, he has been involved in other projects like Neuralink-a plan to connect human brains with computers and The Boring Company, which is a tunnel construction and infrastructure company. He is also remembered for his ambition to colonize Mars and speed up a transition to renewable energy.
His newest venture is actually aligned with this, xAI. The venture focuses on advancing AI properly but in alignment with human values. This now carries forward the continuous commitment to innovation and responsible technological advancement. His ventures are continuously shaping the future of many industries into greater issues to be addressed within worlds ruled by challenges and problems.
xAI is a more ambitious artificial intelligence company led by Elon Musk, aiming to develop some advanced AI technologies in the domain of safety and alignment with human values. Launched in 2022, xAI has been working on the exploration of the complexities regarding human and artificial intelligence while discussing risks associated with AI development.
The company focuses on creating tools and systems in which human-machine interaction is fluid, smooth, and meaningful. xAI wants to take this innovation further in areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, and autonomous systems, making AI less obscure and more advantageous.
Musk drives the mission of xAI with a huge technological background and a reason to be concerned about AI safety and argues for responsible development in AI with a background of ethics and an approach toward society. As the company still goes on to grow and attract big investments, it envisions playing a leading role in reshaping the future of AI into one that is beneficial for mankind.
Pre-money valuation was $18B
Elon Musk is one of the first and most well-known entrepreneurs in the AI area. Tesla, the company he runs, is the leading EV manufacturer with self-driving capabilities. He also co-founded OpenAI, a firm for which he spent tens of millions.Elon Musk’s excitement for OpenAI had dimmed since March when he challenged the company and its co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly breaching its mission statement and becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. He has also accused Google of including bias in its AI products.
Elon Musk’s company launched its chatbot, ChatGPT-rival Grok 1.0 model, in November, a year after introducing xAI. Later, the company made the model available to Premium+ users on X via a chatbot for a monthly fee of $16. In April, the company unveiled the new Grok 1.5 model and gave Premium users on X access to the chatbot. In addition, Musk’s company also demonstrated Grok’s multimodal capabilities. Earlier this year, the company released the Grok model without any training code.
xAI plans to use the money generated from the current investment round to bring its initial set of products to market, construct advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies, according to a recent blog post. The business is expected to seek partnerships to expand Grok’s user base beyond X.
The startup, whose new backers include people Elon Musk knows well, such as Ken Howery, a PayPal and Founders Fund cofounder, claims to want to create “truthful” AI systems. Still, like with other AI chatbots, Grok’s news summary function on X has been observed to hallucinate and fabricate false information.
