Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI is reportedly close to raising $6 billion from investors.
The funding round is expected to value xAI at $18 billion, according to Bloomberg. report Friday (April 26).
According to the Financial Times (FT), Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firm Sequoia Capital has committed to investing in the startup. report Same number as Bloomberg.
Musk also approached Sequoia Capital as well as other investors who participated in the 2022 acquisition of Twitter, which was later renamed Company X, the FT reported.
Musk announced the launch of xAI in July 2023 after hinting for months that he wanted to build a replacement for OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT. He was involved in founding his company OpenAI, but stepped down from his board in 2018, becoming increasingly critical of the company and cautious about developments around AI in general.
Two days later, during a public introduction to xAI on Twitter Spaces, Musk said he sees the company competing directly with major companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, as well as startups like Anthropic. He said his company is taking on a new challenge. Different approaches to establishing basic models.
“AGI” [artificial general intelligence] Brute force attacks will not succeed,” Musk said, adding, “xAI is not trying to solve AGI on laptops, but [and] There will be a lot of compute,” and his team will be free to explore ideas beyond scaling up the data parameters of the base model.
In November 2023, xAI published an AI model called Grok and said on its website: “Grok is designed to answer questions with wit and has a rebellious personality, so don’t use it if you don’t like humor.”
The company added that Grok has real-time knowledge about the world thanks to social media platform X, which is owned by Musk. It answers the “hard questions” that most other AI systems reject. And at its launch, it had features comparable to Meta’s LLaMA 2 AI model and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.
In March, xAI announced an open source AI model. Musk said at the time: “We are releasing the basic model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, a large-scale language model. Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter expert trained from scratch by xAI. It’s a mixed model.