Elon Musk’s xAI secures $6 billion in ChatGPT competitive bidding by year-end

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI announced a $6 billion Series B funding round.

Investors including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding participated in the round.

This round marks a significant milestone, pushing xAI’s valuation to $24 billion just 11 months after the company launched in July 2023.

By comparison, chatGPT creator OpenAI is worth $80 billion, more than three times more than Musk’s xAI. OpenAI launched in December 2015, giving Musk’s AI company an eight-year head start.

Musk’s xAI will deploy funds to advance research and development of socially beneficial AI systems and bring the first products to market. According to the announcement:

“xAI is primarily focused on developing advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial to all humanity. The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.”

After making the announcement, the billionaire tech entrepreneur reached out to his 184 million followers and encouraged them to apply for his AI company. He wrote in an X post on May 27:

“Join xAI if you believe in our mission to understand the universe, which requires the most rigorous pursuit of truth, regardless of popularity or political correctness.”

xAI launched its first AI chatbot, Grok-1, on X last November. Grok-1.5 was released on April 12 and introduced image understanding capabilities that can handle documents, diagrams, charts, screenshots, and photos. A month ago, in March, Grok-1’s network architecture was released as open source.

Related: Political correctness in AI systems is the biggest concern: Elon Musk

Grok could become a ChatGPT competitor by the end of 2024: Musk

Grok is still in the early stages of its technology compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, according to Elon Musk, it could become a ChatGPT competitor by the end of this year.

Musk said in his Viva Tech Paris 2024 speech:

“xAI is a young company, so we still have a lot of catching up to do before we have AI that can compete with Google Deepmind and OpenAI. That will probably happen by the end of the year.”

Despite his ambitions, the billionaire tech entrepreneur has been concerned about the continued development of AI. In March, more than 2,600 technology experts, including Musk, urged a halt to AI development in an open letter, citing “serious risks to society and humanity.”

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