Musk’s AI startup xAI receives $6 billion investment

This article was last updated on May 27, 2024

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Musk’s AI startup xAI receives $6 billion investment

The AI ​​startup that Elon Musk founded last year to compete with OpenAI, among others, has raised $6 billion from investors. The company, xAI, reports this on its website. The money comes partly from large American investors and the Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.

It shows the magnitude of the amounts currently being invested in AI companies. xAI is not unique in this regard. For example, Anthropic has now raised a combined $6 billion from Amazon and Google. Microsoft is still the leader with a total of 13 billion investments in OpenAI.

xAI says it will use the money to bring the first products to market, build “advanced infrastructure” and accelerate research into new technologies.

Collaboration with X

The AI ​​startup has released the Grok model and integrated it into X, the former Twitter. It’s described as an “AI search assistant with a touch of humor and a dash of rebellion.” The AI ​​assistant is available to users who pay for X. In addition, Grok will create summaries of news events based on users’ posts, again only available to paying users. Grok is trained on user data from X.

Musk will use the money at least partly to expand computing power. This is necessary to train the language models, the technology behind these AI systems. In addition, the competition to get the best developers is also fierce, so he will undoubtedly use the money to make a better offer.

It’s unclear how good Grok is. The model cannot be found in testing from the leading Stanford University, which works with just about every other leading AI company. In our own tests of xAI, Grok does not avoid the models of OpenAI and Google by much, but it is unclear how reliable they are.

OpenAI

Musk was involved in the founding of OpenAI in 2015, but quit a few years later due to dissatisfaction with the direction. Last year he was another one of the signatories of a letter calling for a pause on AI developments. He is now fully participating in the AI ​​race with xAI.