- Elon Musk’s startup xAI has raised $6 billion in the second round of funding.
- Some firms investing in the startup include Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital, and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has raised $6 billion in a new funding round for his artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI. The second round of funding comes from Vy Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding. Musk has been raising funds to compete with companies like OpenAI, Alphabet, and Microsoft. The company has been looking to raise the above amount since April at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion.
xAI was founded in July 2023, and X, Musk’s social platform, owns a stake in the startup. It is interesting to note that Musk was also a co-founder of OpenAI. However, his love for OpenAI has waned, and he has even sued the company and Sam Altman, stating that they betrayed the mission statement and became a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. Separately, Musk has accused Google of coding bias into its AI offerings.
See more: Elon Musk Set To Integrate xAI Startup With X Platform
The company released ChatGPT’s rival Grok-1 on X in November and the Grok-1.5 model in April. In the same month, it also previewed the chatbot’s multimodal capabilities. xAI claims that it aims to develop AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial to humanity. However, just like other AI chatbots, Grok’s news summary feature is known to generate misleading information and hallucinate.
The company plans to use the new funds to build advanced infrastructure, bring its first set of products to market, and accelerate research and development of new technologies. xAI may also look for partnerships to introduce Grok to a much wider range of users.
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Karthik comes from a diverse educational and work background. With an engineering degree and a Masters in Supply Chain and Operations Management from Nottingham University, United Kingdom, he has experience of close to 15 years having worked across different industries out of which, he has worked as a content marketing professional for a significant part of his career. Currently, as an assistant editor at Spiceworks Ziff Davis, he covers a broad range of topics across HR Tech and Martech, from talent acquisition to workforce management and from marketing strategy to innovation. Besides being a content professional, Karthik is an avid blogger, traveler, history buff, and fitness enthusiast. To share quotes or inputs for news pieces, please get in touch on [email protected]