xAI, the artificial intelligence start-up of Elon Musk, is all set to close its funding round with a valuation of around $18 million. This week might see the closing of Musk's financing deal for his start-up, as per a report by Bloomberg.
With deliberations still going on, the valuation and the timing of the funding might change, as per the report. As per the report, the OpenAI rival's fundraising round was promoted using a pitch deck that highlighted possible selling points for investors, praised Musk's experience at SpaceX and Tesla Inc., and mentioned that xAI will be able to train on the high-quality data from X.
Large language models—the technology behind AI chatbots—need access to data to be built, and here is where xAI hopes to compete with other well-funded companies like OpenAI, says the report.
Some of the investors that are likely to be a part of the deal include Sequoia Capital and Future Ventures. Valor Equity Partners and Gigafund are some of the other investors who are likely to participate in the round.
According to a TechCrunch report, X (formerly known as Twitter) may stand to gain the most from xAI's rapidly gaining traction. Musk made sure that X has a share in xAI and would profit from any growth the AI company experiences.
The name xAI stands for explainable AI. The company says, “xAI is a new company working on building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery. We are guided by our mission to advance our collective understanding of the universe.”
The most recent announcement by the company was that of Grok-1.5. The most recent model from the company is capable of sophisticated reasoning and extended context awareness. In the next few days, early testers and current Grok users on the X platform will be able to access Grok-1.5. Meanwhile, Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, highlighting that the start-up has abandoned its original mission, which was to develop AI for the benefit of society and not for profit. As per the lawsuit, OpenAI kept its most sophisticated AI model, GPT-4, "a complete secret."
However, OpenAI has refuted the claims. The company said that Musk sent an email advising the startup to "attach to Tesla as its cash cow" and expressed a desire for the business to combine with the manufacturer of electric vehicles, Tesla.
