Elon Musk’s AI start-up, xAI, has raised $6 billion in Series B funding. The company said in a blog post that the round was led by existing investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, Kingdom Holding, and others.
The money raised from this round will be put toward developing cutting-edge infrastructure, bringing xAI's initial products to market, and quickening the creation of new technology.
The company says that its main purpose is to develop advanced AI systems that are competent, truthful, and beneficial for humanity. In a blog post, the company said, “The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.”
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Musk said that the company’s pre-money valuation was $18 billion. Meanwhile, taking to X (formerly Twitter), Musk said, “There will be more to announce (more funding) in the coming weeks.”
Starting in July 2023, the company claims to have made significant strides over the past year. Recently, they released Grok-1.5V, a first-generation multimodal model, as per the company. Along with strong text capabilities, Grok-1.5V also processes other visual information that includes documents, diagrams, screenshots, photographs, and charts, as per the company.
Similarly, in March 2024, the company announced the launch of Grok-1.5. As per the company, the model is capable of “long context understanding and advanced reasoning.”
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Initially, Musk was a supporter of OpenAI before ChatGPT was introduced in 2022. Later, he parted ways with OpenAI and has repeatedly advocated for the potential dangers of OpenAI. xAI was founded as a challenger to OpenAI. Musk even sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for renouncing the start-up's initial goal of creating artificial intelligence for human benefit rather than financial gain.
However, OpenAI has rejected the claims. In a blog post, OpenAI said, "We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom we've deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI's mission without him.”
