Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6 billion to fund its race against ChatGPT and all the rest

May 28, 2024 12:03 AM - 5 months ago 61717

Elon Musk founded xAI past summer, and coming it announced raising $6 cardinal successful funding, saying it will thief bring nan startup’s “first products to market, build precocious infrastructure, and accelerate nan investigation and improvement of early technologies.”

So far, xAI has launched Grok, a supposedly edgier type of OpenAI’s ChatGPT disposable via X, formerly known arsenic Twitter, wherever nan chatbot is presently only disposable to X Premium subscribers.

Funding successful this information came from respective sources, according to xAI, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabian Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. Last year, a filing pinch nan Securities and Exchange Commission showed that xAI was looking to raise up to $1 billion successful equity investments, and a fewer months ago, The Financial Times reported it was seeking up to.... $6 billion. Musk denied that study astatine nan time.

The hardware tin of powering AI improvement is beautiful pricey, pinch Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell B200 AI graphics cards costing anyplace from $30,000 to $40,000 apiece. Last week, a study from The Information said that xAI would request 100,000 of Nvidia’s existent H100 chips for a supercomputer to powerfulness an upgraded type of its Grok AI chatbot. Musk reportedly told investors nan scheme is to motorboat nan caller information halfway by nan autumn of 2025.

Continuing connected successful nan AI title for chips, talent, and exertion won’t beryllium inexpensive — large tech firms person dumped billions into AI startups for illustration Anthropic successful summation to nan resources Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are pouring into AI projects of their own.

Microsoft has besides struck a multi-billion business pinch OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman is reportedly pursuing trillions much dollars to revamp nan world spot industry. Musk, a founding personnel of OpenAI, is suing that company while claiming it has abandoned its ngo to use humanity.

Outside of xAI and OpenAI, Musk said he would “prefer to build products extracurricular of Tesla” erstwhile it comes to AI and robotics unless he gets much control. Tesla shareholders will start voting this week connected whether to reconstruct Musk’s $56 cardinal salary package up of its yearly gathering connected June 13th.

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