Elon Musk‘s synthetic intelligence startup has raised an enormous Sequence B funding spherical.
The corporate, xAI, says that it has secured $6 billion in a brand new spherical of funding that values it at $24 billion. Buyers within the spherical embody Constancy, Valor Fairness Companions, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, and others.
A $6 billion funding spherical is an astonishingly massive quantity for a corporation launched lower than a 12 months in the past, and underscores the will for buyers to safe a bit of AI companies. It’s also a wager on Musk, who continues to function CEO or a prime govt at firms together with Tesla, SpaceX, X (previously Twitter) The Boring Firm and Neuralink.
Within the case of xAI, its first main product is a big language mannequin referred to as Grok, which is accessible to premium customers of X. Grok is Musk’s model of an LLN, competing with the likes of OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama.
“xAI is primarily targeted on the event of superior AI techniques which are truthful, competent, and maximally helpful for all of humanity,” the corporate mentioned in a press release asserting the Sequence B spherical. “The corporate’s mission is to grasp the true nature of the universe.”
Musk, in fact, is likely one of the richest folks on the earth and has launched or acquired quite a few firms that contact a lot of the U.S. economic system (SpaceX, for instance, is likely one of the fastest-growing web suppliers on the earth by way of its Starlink service).
His efforts at X have been considerably much less profitable, after buying the social platform for $44 billion two years in the past. The corporate’s worth has been written down by Constancy a number of occasions for the reason that acquisition, with Musk antagonizing some advertisers by way of feedback he has made at public occasions.
Now, xAI is on the coronary heart of the corporate’s turnaround plan, with Grok baked into the premium model of the platform. It’s not instantly clear if xAI will search to make the mannequin extra broadly obtainable.