Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI has secured $500 million in new funding. bloomberg It was reported on Friday amid an apparent showdown over the place of technology at his electric car company.
Last December, Musk’s AI startup notified the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of its intention to raise $1 billion through a stock offering. According to the documents, Musk had already secured more than $134 million at the time.
that much bloomberg The sources said xAI is targeting a valuation of $15 billion to $20 billion, but terms could change over time. Musk has yet to comment on the raise.
Since the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4 last year, Musk has been racing with the company he co-founded to bring the next generation of generative AI to market. Before Grok’s launch in November, Musk touted the AI model, first announced in July, as the best to date, claiming xAI would connect Grok to Twitter and have “real-time knowledge of the world.”
“Tomorrow, xAI will release its first AI to a select group of people,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “In several important respects, it is the best AI that exists today.”
After Grok was released, Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman traded insults over the revered AI.
But Musk warned that AI could threaten humanity by controlling global computers and weapons systems. In a less dire prediction, Musk warned that artificial intelligence will eventually replace humans in the workforce.
“For the first time, we will have something smarter than the smartest human being,” Musk said at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park last fall. “It’s hard to say exactly what that moment will be, but there will come a point when you won’t need a job. If you want a job for personal satisfaction, you can have one, but AI can do it all. .”
On Tuesday new york times Musk, who is also Tesla’s CEO, reportedly threatened to pull his artificial intelligence designs out of the company unless the board gave him more than $80 billion in stock.
Musk’s threat to pull AI out of Tesla is the latest conflict in which Musk has been involved. In an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit in November with the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, the world’s richest man told investors to “go fuck themselves” after several attempts. Advertisers have threatened to leave Twitter after Musk made what they called anti-Semitic remarks on the platform.
“If someone’s trying to blackmail me with an ad, would you blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself,” he said. “Go. Fuck yourself. Are you sure? I hope so.”
Of course, cryptocurrency degens turned that moment into a memecoin.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.