Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, has announced the completion of a $6 billion Series B funding round.
This funding milestone elevates xAI’s valuation to $24 billion, just 11 months after its launch in July 2023.
The investment round included participation from prominent investors such as Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding.
Despite xAI’s rapid growth, it still trails behind OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which has an $80 billion valuation. OpenAI, founded in December 2015, has an eight-year head start over Musk’s AI company.
xAI plans to use the new funds to enhance the research and development of its AI systems, aiming to introduce its first product to the market.
According to the company’s announcement,
“xAI is primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity. The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.”
Following the funding announcement, Musk reached out to his 184 million followers on X, encouraging them to join his AI company.
On May 27, he posted,
“Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.”
In November, xAI released its first AI chatbot, Grok-1. The updated Grok-1.5, announced on April 12, introduced image-understanding capabilities, enabling it to process documents, diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photos. Additionally, in March, the network architecture of Grok-1 was made open-source.
Grok remains in its early stages compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, Musk believes it could become a strong competitor by the end of the year.
Speaking at Viva Tech Paris 2024, Musk stated,
“xAI is a new company so it still has a lot of catching up to do before it has an AI that is competitive with Google Deepmind and OpenAI. Maybe towards the end of the year, we will have that.”
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