Elon Musk’s xAI Raises $6B for Generative AI Research
Elon Musk-founded startup xAI has raised $6 Billion in a Series B funding round from a mix of investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and the Saudi government-backed Kingdom Holding Co., among others. The new funding pins xAI’s valuation at $24 billion and will likely go toward the startup’s efforts to outstrip OpenAI and other generative AI companies in developing and deploying new versions of Grok and other large language models (LLMs).
xAI Cash
Musk has pushed xAI to move fast when it comes to generative AI development. The company recently debuted its Grok-1.5 model and the Grok-1.5V multi-modal variation, as well as making Grok-1 open-source, albeit not the fine-tuning and training data used on the model. Though xAI hasn’t specifically said where the new money will go, it will likely help with bringing products to market, as well as expand the features for the associated Grok chatbot. For instance, the X social media platform recently began using Grok to summarize news stories.
The investment is likely to also support Musk’s rumored plans for a massive cluster of supercomputers with enormous processing power. The investors are an interesting mix, with several also having invested in Musk’s purchases and transformation of Twitter into X. Notably, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are also OpenAI investors. One thing for sure is that Musk is keen to staff up the company, making a direct appeal for like-minded researchers and programmers in a post on X.
Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness https://t.co/jWEGDDnVk1
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 27, 2024
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