Elon Musk's xAI raises $6 billion to build AI systems to 'understand the true nature of the universe'
Elon Musk founded xAI last summer on the back of stating he was 'uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI and robotics' unless he had more voting power.
Now, the AI startup has just announced raising $6 billion (£4.7 billion) in funding.
The tech billionaire said the funds will help bring the startup’s 'first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.'
Key investors in this funding round included big-shot Silicon Valley firms like Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, along with Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and the country's Kingdom Holding fund.
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The company announced the news over the weekend, with Elon Musk confirming that the pre-money valuation for the company was $18 billion.
Despite only being a year old, the company has rapidly built its own large language model (LLM), the technology behind many recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence that can produce human-like text, images, videos, and voices.
xAI's only publicly available product so far has been Grok, an AI chatbot set to compete against OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Musk was originally a co-founder of OpenAI, but filed a suit against the company alleging that Sam Altman and other executives had 'breached the founding agreement' by focusing on private commercial success rather than working for the benefit of humanity.
Promoted by Musk as a more edgy and open chatbot, Grok has recently attracted attention for generating fake news headlines.
Grok is available on the X platform (formerly Twitter) exclusively for X Premium subscribers.
A report from The Information indicated that xAI would need 100,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips to power an upgraded version of its Grok AI chatbot. As such, Musk has reportedly informed investors that the goal is to launch a new data centre by the fall of 2025.
The Tesla CEO also added that 'there will be more to announce in the coming weeks.'
The power of AI is becoming more of a hot topic every day and it shows as big tech firms are dumping billions into AI startups like Anthropic as well as their own projects at Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
xAI claimed it's still 'primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity,' with a mission 'to understand the true nature of the universe.'