Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has announced a $6 billion Series B funding round.
The round saw participation from investors such as Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.
This round represents a significant milestone for xAI, bringing its valuation to $24 billion just 11 months after the company launched in July 2023.
By comparison, OpenAI, the creator of chatGPT, is worth $80 billion, three times as much as Musk’s xAI. OpenAI launched in December 2015, putting it eight years ahead of Elon Musk’s AI company.
Musk’s xAI company will deploy the funds to spur research and development of socially beneficial AI systems and help bring the first product to market. According to the announcement:
“xAI is primarily focused on developing advanced AI systems that are honest, efficient, and maximally benefit all of humanity. The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.
Following the announcement, the billionaire tech entrepreneur reached out to his 184 million followers, encouraging them to apply to his AI company. He wrote in an article on May 27
“Join xAI if you believe in our mission to understand the universe, which requires the highest precision in the pursuit of truth, regardless of popularity or political correctness.”
xAI launched its first AI-powered chatbot on the X, Grok-1, last November. Announced on April 12, Grok-1.5 offers image understanding capabilities that allow it to process documents, graphs, diagrams, screenshots and images. A month ago, in March, the Grok-1 network architecture was open source.
about: Political correctness in AI systems is the biggest concern: Elon Musk
Grok could become a competitor to ChatGPT by the end of 2024: Musk
Grok is still in its technological infancy compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, it could become a competitor to ChatGPT by the end of this year, according to Elon Musk.
Musk said during his speech at Viva Tech Paris 2024:
“xAI is a new company, so it still has a lot of catching up to do before it has AI that rivals Google Deepmind and OpenAI. “Maybe we’ll get there by the end of the year.”
Despite his ambitions, the billionaire tech entrepreneur was concerned about the continued development of artificial intelligence. In March, more than 2,600 technology experts, including Musk, called for a pause in AI development, citing “profound risks to society and humanity” in an open letter.
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