Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6 billion in a funding round, the artificial intelligence startup announced late Sunday, boosting its billionaire owner’s ambitions to take on ChatGPT creator OpenAI and other companies like Google and Anthropic.
Musk said xAI’s pre-money valuation was $18 billion.
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Key Takeaways
- In a blog post, xAI named Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Saudi entrepreneur Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, Fidelity Management & Research Company and others as the investors who participated in the Series B funding.
- In a post on X, Musk claimed xAI’s “pre-money valuation” was $18 billion.
- Musk said there will be “more to announce in the coming weeks,” with the blog post adding that the company will be bringing “multiple exciting technology updates and products soon.”
- Funds raised in the latest round will be used to “take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” the startup said.
Crucial Quote
Musk issued a hiring call for AI developers, asking them to join his company if they “believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.”
Key Background
After accusing OpenAI’s ChatGPT of being biased, politically correct and “woke,” Musk formed xAI in April last year. Musk was a co-founder and early backer of OpenAI, but his relationship with the company has soured in recent years, culminating in Musk filing a lawsuit against OpenAI.
In the suit, Musk alleged the ChatGPT creator undermined its foundational goal of developing an open-source AGI to “benefit humanity” in favor of maximizing profits. The billionaire has also attacked OpenAI’s chief rival Google, saying the issues with its Gemini AI tool stemmed from the company being a “woke bureaucratic blob.” In November, xAI released its chatbot called ‘Grok’, which is only accessible to X users who pay for a premium subscription.
