OpenAI, xAI Push to Improve their Artificial Intelligence Capabilities

May 28, 2024

33 2 minutes read

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Open AI training new AI model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology
Elon Musk’s AI company raises $6 billion in funding

Two of the leading artificial intelligence company’s announced updates to the lead in the AI arms race.

OpenAI has begun training a new flagship IA model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT, according to a press release May 28.

“OpenAI has recently begun training its next frontier model and we anticipate the resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI,” the company said in a press statement.

New Safety Board

The update was part of an announcement that OpenAI Board formed a new Safety and Security Committee, led by directors Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Nicole Seligman, and CEO Sam Altman, will be responsible for making recommendations on critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations.

The move comes after actress Scarlett Johansson a week earlier wrote that she is mulling legal action after Johansson, who voiced an AI chatbot in the 2013 movie Her, objected to an “eerily similar” voice to hers being used by OpenAI for their new GPT-4o chatbot after declining repeated offers from Altman to be the voice.

“While we are proud to build and release models that are industry-leading on both capabilities and safety, we welcome a robust debate at this important moment,” the company stated in its press release announcing the safety board.

xAI Raise $6 Billion

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI announced on May 26 it has raised $6 billion in funding.

According to the company, Series B investors include Valor Equity Partners, VY Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.

Musk wrote on the social media site X that before the investment, xAI had a valuation of $18 billion. The new funding should help Musk’s company compete against Microsoft and OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, in the race to develop artificial intelligence.

Musk Looks to Market Expansion

It’s been less than a year xAI was formed. On November 4, 2023, xAI unveiled Grok, an AI chatbot that is integrated with X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. Its first release had reasoning and coding capabilities of 63.2% on the HumanEval coding task and 73% on Multidisciplinary multiple (MMLU), the company claimed when it was launched.

In March, the company rolled out Grok-1.5 model with long context capability and was promoted as achieving a 50.6% score on the MATH benchmark and a 90% score on the GSM8K benchmark. Additionally, it scored 74.1% on the HumanEval benchmark, which evaluates code generation and problem-solving abilities.

That was followed by Grok-1.5V with image understanding, able to process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photographs, according to company officials.

The new money is being earmarked to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies, the company said in its press release.