From the Wall Street Journal, April 5:
Funding round could value the artificial-intelligence startup at $18 billion, though details aren’t finalized
Investors close to Elon Musk are in talks to help xAI raise $3 billion in a round that would value the tycoon’s artificial-intelligence startup at $18 billion, people familiar with the matter said.
The venture-capital firm Gigafund and Steve Jurvetson, a prominent Musk backer and co-founder of another venture firm, are among the backers considering investing in the round, the people said.
Jurvetson is a longtime Musk friend who sits on the board of his rocket company, SpaceX, and was a director at Tesla until 2020. Gigafund was co-founded by Luke Nosek, also a SpaceX director, who like Musk is a member of the “
PayPal mafia” group that started the payments company. Musk and Nosek together once tried to buy DeepMind, the AI company that is now part of Google.
Terms of the xAI fundraising haven’t been finalized and the plans could change.
The proposed fundraising marks another escalation in the artificial-intelligence arms race. Leading AI startups have raised billions of dollars in recent years to fund the computing resources needed to train advanced large language models, the technology powering generative AI chatbots.ChatGPT-creator OpenAI has secured $13 billion in committed funding from
Microsoft, while its rival, Anthropic, raised over $6 billion.With xAI, Musk has been playing catch-up with his more well-funded rivals. He launched xAI publicly in July, making some investors skeptical that it has enough time to compete with other leading AI firms. The startup released its chatbot, Grok, in November and made it available to subscribers on his social-media platform, X. Last month, xAI introduced its latest AI model, called Grok-1.5, and said it would soon be available to early testers and existing Grok users....
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