Updated December 25; 12:21 pm Pacific: Added details of xAI's valuation and Kingdom Holdings' contribution.
Elon Musk's AI company xAI rose up $6 billion in Series C financing round.
the company It was announced this week. Andreessen Horowitz; Blackrock, Fidelity Lightspeed, MGX Morgan Stanley; OIA QIA Sequoia Capital; Valor Equity Partners; Vy Capital, Nvidia AMD and others participated.
Kingdom Holdings; Saudi The conglomerate holding company has invested roughly $400 million in a Public presentation.. xAI is now worth $45 billion, nearly double its previous value, the filing said.
The new cash brings xAI's total to $12 billion and adds $6 billion to xAI rose up in May.
according to In the Financial Times; Only investors who backed xAI in its previous fundraising round are eligible to participate in this program. According to the news, investors helped. Funding was provided by Musk's Twitter. Access Up to 25% stake in xAI.
“xAI's most powerful model … is currently in training and now focused on introducing new innovative consumer and business products” xAI He said. In the statement. “Funds from this financing round will be used to further accelerate our advanced infrastructure, ship the most innovative products … and … research and development.”
Improve AI.
Musk formed xAI last year. Shortly after, the company came out. GrokA top-of-the-line next-generation AI model that powers multiple features in X, including a chatbot now available; X premium and subscribers Free users In some regions.
Grok has what Musk describes as a “rebellious intensity”—a desire to answer “thick questions denied by other AI systems.” To speak of a lowly person; For example, Grok swears colorful language you can't hear; ChatGPT.
There is Musk. Mocking ChatGPT and other AI systems are too “woke” and “politically correct” despite being Grok's own. Unwillingness to cross certain boundaries. versus Farm Political subjects. He also refers to Grok as “maximal truth-seeking”, although less biased than rival models. Evidence Grok suggests leaning to the left.
In the past year, Grok has taken root in the social network X, formerly known as Twitter. It was Grok at launch. Only It's available to X users — and developers are skilled enough to get it. “Open Source” publishing Run up.
Thank you for one. Integration With xAI's in-house image generation model, I'm excited.Grok can generate images in X (controversially without brackets). The model can analyze images and summarize news and trending events — Imperfectmind
Reports indicate that Grok could handle more X functions in the future. Promotion and X's search capabilities Account bios To help with post analytics and response settings. X recently receivedGrok buttonDesigned to help users discover “relevant content” and dive deeper into trending discussions and real-time events.
xAI is racing to catch formidable rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic in the next-generation AI race. the company was launched. Customers can use Grok with third-party apps, An API in October that allows building platforms and services. And rolled out. A separate Grok iOS app For the experimental audience.
Musk insists it's not a fair fight.
in one Lawsuit Imported. Against OpenAI and Microsoft, lawyers for Musk, a close collaborator of OpenAI, accuse competitors like xAI of “actively trying to eliminate OpenAI by extracting promises from investors.” Not to fund them.” OpenAI, Musk's advisers unfairly benefited from what lawyers described as “virtual integration” of Microsoft's infrastructure and expertise, Musk said.
But Musk has often said that X's data gives xAI a leg up on competitors. X last month changed. Its privacy policy allows third parties, including xAI, to train models on X posts.
Musk, one of the original founders of OpenAI, left the company in 2018 amid disagreements over its direction. OpenAI had benefited from its early involvement, but had reneged on its nonprofit commitment to reap the fruits of its AI research, argued in previous suits.
Surprisingly, OpenAI Disagree. Musk's interpretation of events.
An xAI ecosystem
xAI has expressed a vision that it will train models on data from Musk's various companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, and that his models could improve technologies across those companies. According to The Wall Street Journal, customer support features for SpaceX's Starlink Internet service are already available, and the startup is working on it. He said. Talks with Tesla to provide R&D for some of the automaker's revenue.
Tesla shareholders oppose these plans. Many sued Musk. Musk argues that there is, and on his decision to launch xAI Talent and resources were diverted. From Tesla to fundamentally competitive businesses.
Nevertheless, The deals — and xAI's developer and consumer-facing products — have pushed xAI's revenue to about $100 million a year. Comparative anthropology Received news. On pace to reach $1 billion in revenue this year, OpenAI aims to reach $4 billion by the end of 2024.
Musk said this summer that xAI built in 122 days at its Memphis data center and is currently training Grok models that are partially powered by portable diesel generators. The company expects to upgrade its server farm with 100,000 Nvidia GPUs next year. In its press release, xAI said it plans to fully double that number. (GPUs are popular chips for training and running models because of their ability to perform many parallel calculations.)
xAI won in November. Confirmation from the Memphis Regional Power Authority for an additional 150MW — enough to power roughly 100,000 homes. To win the agency, xAI promised to improve the quality of the city's drinking water and supply Tesla-manufactured batteries to the Memphis grid at a discount. But some residents have criticized the move, arguing it will affect electricity. It got worse. Air quality of the area.
So is Tesla. Expected. To use an upgraded data center to improve its autonomous driving technologies.
xAI has grown relatively quickly from an operational standpoint since its inception, growing to just a dozen employees by March 2023. More than 100 Today begins in October. Transfer to OpenAI's old corporate offices in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood.
xAI has reportedly told investors it plans to raise more money next year.
It's not just AI labs raising big bucks. Humanity Recently It received $4 billion from Amazon, and $13.7 billion of its total came from OpenAI. rose up It has $6.6 billion in October to boost its war chest to $17.9 billion.
Megadeals like OpenAI's and Anthropic's push AI venture capital activity to $31.1 billion in Q3 2024 with over 2,000 deals. Rate PitchBook data.
TechCrunch has an AI-focused newsletter. Register here. Get it in your inbox every Wednesday.