Musk created an artificial intelligence startup 10 months ago to let researchers work on existential problems. He also mentioned joining the startup with the widely known social Media platform X (formerly known as Twitter). Later, xAI unveiled an AI chatbot exclusively available for X’s premium subscribers known as Grok. xAI is a startup company building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery, focusing on advancing collective understanding of the universe. We are discussing Musk Raised $6B, Funding For AI Startup That Will be The Rival of OpenAI.
$6B funding for a startup may sound a bit unbelievable, but looking at the technical team members, you will know why investors trust them with their money. “Grok,” The AI chatbot available in X (formerly known as Twitter) for premium users in partnership with xAI, was developed quickly. The reason is simple: it is a team in demand with the absolute best programmers working with Musk. Now, let’s take a little peek at the members working for xAI. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, leads the startup.
Other technical team members have also worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. These members introduced all these innovative techniques and analyses, such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, μTransfer, and SimCLR. In addition, they have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field, including AlphaCode, Inception, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Now you know why everyone wanted to get a share in this “startup.”
With X already being a shareholder, the deal for xAI was originally supposed to rise to $3B, but due to a sudden perk of interest from investors and the general public, the price was raised. The startup is said to be raising $6B on a pre-money valuation of $18B.
The deal for investors to get a quarter of the company will close soon. In addition, Jared Birchall, the known head of Musk’s family office, told investors about xAI raising $3B at a pre-money valuation of $15B a few weeks ago. However, a sudden rise in investors trying to get into the deal doubled those numbers. According to the Financial Times, Musk is looking for up to $6 billion in funding.
Everyone knows by now that the main objective of xAI is to connect the digital and physical worlds. Still, not many know that Musk planned to do this by getting training data from his own companies, including X, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Tesla. As explained earlier, X(Twitter) is already a shareholder of xAI and has an AI chatbot named Grok. Another investor would be Tesla; they have been working with AI for a long time, focusing on “ self-driving cars” and “Optimus, “The humanoid robot
designed by Tesla.” Tesla has some specific use cases, and Tesla data is valuable; now, whether the shareholders of Tesla will allow the sharing of data or not is a whole other story, but Elon, in general, wants to use the data of these companies for the xAI. X also owns a share in xAI, which means the overall performance of xAI will automatically boost the social media platform.
Musk co-founded Open AI in 2015 but left the board after 4 years due to disagreements. Later, OpenAI became the fastest-growing startup in history. The rivalry between the two is publicly known by many, as Musk once sued OpenAI’s CEO for moving from their original “non-profit” goal to “for-profit.” Last month, Elon open-sourced the architecture of Grok-1 (the earliest chatbot for xAI), another step in Musk’s efforts to distinguish it from Open AI.
Conclusion
Elon Musk’s AI startup, established just 10 months ago, aims to address existential challenges through advanced AI research. With a collaboration with X (formerly Twitter), xAI aims to connect digital and physical worlds. An exceptional technical team, including DeepMind, OpenAI, and Google Research members, backed the $6 billion funding. Musk’s strategic vision of utilizing training data from his companies underscores the ambitious goals of xAI. As the funding round nears closure, the industry awaits the transformative impact of xAI’s endeavors under Musk’s leadership.
Disclaimer -We have collected this information from our direct sources, various trustworthy sources on the internet and the facts have been checked manually and verified by our in-house team.