Elon Musk's xAI has raised $6 billion in its second round of funding, valuing the inventor of the AI model Grok at $24 billion.
xAI says it has secured funding from investors including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.
The company was founded lower than a 12 months ago in July 2023 and has already released several iterations of its Grok LLM. Elon Musk's criticism of OpenAI's closed model approach continued with xAI's release of Grok-1's weights and architecture.
The company says the newly secured funds can be used to “launch xAI's first products, construct advanced infrastructure, and speed up research and development of future technologies.”
Musk previously stated that his goal with xAI was to create “maximally truthful” AI models without regard to political correctness.
Grok has already made enhancements to the context window and brought a step toward multimodal performance with the discharge of Grok 1.5V with image understanding capabilities.
xAI says it’ll “proceed this steep progression in the approaching months and can be announcing several exciting technology updates and products shortly.”
Musk is notorious for setting extremely tight deadlines for his projects, and xAI is seeking to add to its team of engineers to assist regain investor confidence.
Yann LeCun made fun of Elon Musk's pitch for brand spanking new engineers at X.
Come to xAI for those who can tolerate a boss who:
– claims that what you might be working on can be solved in the following 12 months (no pressure).
– claiming that what you might be working on is killing everyone and desires to be stopped or paused (yay, 6 months vacation!).
– claims to want “maximum rigorous prosecution” …— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) May 27, 2024
In the battle for dominance within the open model space, Meta and xAI are currently leading the best way. With additional funding and Musk's unconventional approach, xAI could have the last laugh when the promised updates are announced.
