Elon Musk’s xAI has raised $6b in sequence B funding taking the creator of AI mannequin Grok to a valuation of $24b.
xAI says it secured the funding from traders together with Valor Fairness Companions, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Constancy Administration & Analysis Firm, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding.
The corporate was established lower than a yr in the past in July 2023 and has already launched a number of iterations of its Grok LLM. Elon Musk’s criticism of OpenAI’s closed mannequin method was adopted up with xAI’s launch of Grok-1’s weights and structure.
The corporate says the newly secured funds will probably be used “to take xAI’s first merchandise to market, construct superior infrastructure, and speed up the analysis and improvement of future applied sciences.”
Musk beforehand acknowledged that his purpose with xAI is to create “maximally truthful” AI fashions with no regard for political correctness.
Grok has already seen extensions of its context window in addition to a step towards multimodal efficiency with the discharge of Grok 1.5V with picture understanding capabilities.
xAI says that it “will proceed on this steep trajectory of progress over the approaching months, with a number of thrilling know-how updates and merchandise quickly to be introduced.”
Musk is notorious for putting extraordinarily tight timelines on his initiatives and xAI is on a recruitment drive so as to add to the group of engineers accountable for repaying investor confidence.
Yann LeCun took to X to have a little bit enjoyable with Elon Musk’s pitch for brand new engineers.
Be a part of xAI if you happen to can stand a boss who:
– claims that what you’re engaged on will probably be solved subsequent yr (no stress).
– claims that what you’re engaged on will kill everybody and should be stopped or paused (yay, trip for six months!).
– claims to desire a “maximally rigorous pursuit…— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) Could 27, 2024
The battle for superiority within the open mannequin house at the moment sees Meta and xAI main the pack. With extra funding and Musk’s maverick method, xAI might properly have the final chuckle when the promised updates are introduced.
