Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6 billion from Valor, a16z, and Sequoia

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has raised $6 billion in a new funding round, it said today, in one of the largest deals in this emerging field, as it raises capital to compete aggressively with rivals including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. .

Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding are among the backers who have invested in the Series B funding of xAI, the startup. books In a blog post.

The funding confirms a TechCrunch report from April that xAI was looking to raise $6 billion. xAI was at the time finalizing a round that would have given it a valuation of $18 billion, TechCrunch reported at the time. xAI, which only started last year and spun off from social network X, and whether X has also invested.

Musk confirmed that the value of the investment round amounted to $18 billion in advance.

Musk is one of the first and most well-known entrepreneurs in the field of artificial intelligence. Tesla, a self-driving car company, is one of the top electric car manufacturers using self-driving technologies. He is also a co-founder of OpenAI, a startup in which he has invested tens of millions of dollars. Musk’s love for OpenAI has waned since then: In March, he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly betraying its mission statement and becoming a “de facto closed-source subsidiary” of Microsoft. Google was also accused Coding prejudice In its AI products.

After forming XAI, Musk released the competing ChatGPT model Grok 1.0 in November. Later, the company made the model available through the chatbot to Premium+ users — who pay $16 per month — on X. In April, the company released the new Grok 1.5 model and also allowed Premium users on X to access the chatbot. Additionally, the Musk-owned company previewed Grok’s products Multimedia capabilities in April. Earlier this year, the company open-sourced the Grok model but without any training code.

xAI said it plans to deploy funds from the new funding round to bring the first set of products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies. Blog post. The company will likely look for partnerships to bring Grok to users beyond the X range.

The company claims that it aims to develop “honest” AI systems. However, the Grok news summary feature on the mentioned To hallucinate and generate misleading information.