Elon Musk’s xAI has raised $6b in series B funding taking the creator of AI model Grok to a valuation of $24b.
xAI says it secured the funding from investors including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding.
The company was established less than a year ago in July 2023 and has already released several iterations of its Grok LLM. Elon Musk’s criticism of OpenAI’s closed model approach was followed up with xAI’s release of Grok-1’s weights and architecture.
The company says the newly secured funds will be used “to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.”
Musk previously stated that his goal with xAI is to create “maximally truthful” AI models with no regard for political correctness.
Grok has already seen extensions of its context window as well as a step toward multimodal performance with the release of Grok 1.5V with image understanding capabilities.
xAI says that it “will continue on this steep trajectory of progress over the coming months, with multiple exciting technology updates and products soon to be announced.”
Musk is infamous for placing extremely tight timelines on his projects and xAI is on a recruitment drive to add to the team of engineers responsible for repaying investor confidence.
Yann LeCun took to X to have a little fun with Elon Musk’s pitch for new engineers.
Join xAI if you can stand a boss who:
– claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).
– claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).
– claims to want a “maximally rigorous pursuit…— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) May 27, 2024
The battle for superiority in the open model space currently sees Meta and xAI leading the pack. With additional funding and Musk’s maverick approach, xAI may well have the last laugh when the promised updates are announced.
