xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, has educated $6 billion in a Series C funding round.
The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz, Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, AMD and others participated.
Kingdom Holdings, the Saudi conglomerate's holding company, invested around $400 million within the round, in accordance with a report public submission. The filing also revealed that xAI is now price $45 billion, almost double its previous value.
The latest funding brings xAI's total raising to $12 billion, adding to the $6 billion tranche that XAI raised in May.
After According to the Financial Times, only investors who had supported xAI within the previous funding round were allowed to take part in this funding round. Investors who helped finance Musk's Twitter takeover were reportedly named Access as much as 25% of xAI shares.
“xAI’s strongest model to this point… is currently being trained and we are actually focused on launching progressive latest consumer and enterprise products,” xAI said in a press release. “The funds from this round of financing shall be used to further speed up our advanced infrastructure, deliver breakthrough products… and… speed up research and development.”
Expand AI
Musk founded xAI last yr. Shortly thereafter, the corporate released Grok, a flagship generative AI model that now supports plenty of features on X, including a chatbot accessible to X Premium subscribers and free users in some regions.
Grok has what Musk has called a “rebellious streak” – a willingness to “answer sharp questions which might be rejected by most other AI systems.” Grok, for instance, is known as vulgar and happily obliges by spewing obscenities and colourful expressions not heard on ChatGPT.
Musk has mocked ChatGPT and other AI systems for being too “woke” and “politically correct” in comparison with Grok’s own Unwillingness to cross certain boundaries And Hedge on political issues. He has also described Grok as “maximally truth-seeking” and fewer biased than competing models, although that’s true Proof to point that Grok leans to the left.
Over the past yr, Grok has turn into increasingly established on X, the social network formerly often known as Twitter. At the beginning Grok was for
Thanks to an integration with Aurora, xAI's in-house image generation model, Grok can generate images on X (without guardrails, controversial). The model may also analyze images and summarize news and trending events – imperfectSpirit.
Grok could reportedly tackle much more of X's features in the long run, from improving X's search capabilities and account bios to helping with post evaluation and reply settings. X recently received a “Grok Button” designed to assist users discover “relevant context” and dive deeper into trending discussions and real-time events.
xAI is sprinting to meet up with formidable competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic within the generative AI race. The company launched an API in October that permits customers to integrate Grok with third-party apps, platforms and services. And it just launched a standalone Grok iOS app to a test audience.
Musk insists it was not a good fight.
In a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAI's close associate, Musk's lawyers accuse OpenAI of “actively attempting to eliminate competitors” like xAI by “extracting guarantees from investors.” to not finance themAccording to Musk's lawyer, OpenAI also unfairly advantages from Microsoft's infrastructure and expertise, in what the lawyers call a “de facto merger.”
Still, Musk often says that X's data gives xAI a leg up on competitors. Last month, X modified its privacy policy to permit third parties, including xAI, to coach models for X contributions.
It's price noting that Musk was one in all the unique founders of OpenAI and left the corporate in 2018 after disagreements over its direction. In previous lawsuits, he has argued that OpenAI benefited from his early involvement but broke its charitable promise to make the fruits of its AI research available to all.
Unsurprisingly, OpenAI disagrees with Musk's interpretation of events.
An xAI ecosystem
xAI has outlined a vision during which its models could be trained on data from Musk's various firms, including Tesla and SpaceX, and the models could then improve those firms' technology. According to the Wall Street Journal, xAI already runs customer support for SpaceX's Starlink web service, and so does the startup said to be in talks with Tesla to supply research and development in exchange for a portion of the automaker's revenue.
On the one hand, Tesla shareholders reject these plans. Several have sued Musk over his decision to launch xAI, arguing that Musk did so each talent and resources diverted from Tesla to an essentially competing company.
Still, the deals — and xAI's developer- and consumer-focused products — have boosted xAI's revenue to around $100 million a yr. For comparison: Anthropic is allegedly is heading in the right direction to generate $1 billion in revenue this yr, and OpenAI is targeting $4 billion by the top of 2024.
Musk said this summer that xAI is training the following generation of Grok models at its Memphis data center, which was apparently in-built just 122 days and is currently partially powered by portable diesel generators. The company hopes to upgrade the server farm, which accommodates 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, next yr; In a press release, xAI said it plans to totally double that number. (Because of their ability to perform many calculations in parallel, GPUs are the popular chips for training and running models.)
In November, xAI won permit from the Regional Power Authority in Memphis for 150 MW of additional electricity – enough to power about 100,000 homes. To win over the agency, xAI promised to enhance the standard of the town's drinking water and power Memphis' power grid with discounted batteries made by Tesla. However, some residents criticized the move, saying it could put a strain on the facility grid worsen the air quality in the realm.
Tesla is simply too expected to make use of the modernized data center to enhance its autonomous driving technologies.
xAI has grown quite quickly from an operational perspective within the yr since its inception, growing from only a dozen employees in March 2023 over 100 Today. In October, the startup moved into OpenAI's old corporate offices in San Francisco's Mission District.
xAI has reportedly told investors that it plans to lift more cash next yr.
It won't be the one AI lab bringing in huge revenue. Anthropic recently secured $4 billion from Amazon, bringing its total raised to $13.7 billion, while OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in October, bringing its war chest to $17.9 billion increased.
Megadeals like OpenAI and Anthropic drove AI enterprise capital activity to $31.1 billion across over 2,000 deals within the third quarter of 2024. per PitchBook data.
