From TechCrunch, May 26:
Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has raised $6 billion in a new funding round, it said today, as Musk shores up capital to aggressively compete with rivals including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Alphabet.
Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding are among the backers who have invested in xAI’s Series B funding, the startup wrote in a blog post.
The funding confirms TechCrunch‘s reporting from April that xAI was looking to raise $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion. At the time, TechCrunch also reported that Musk has seen to it that X, the social network he now owns and controls, also owns a stake in xAI so will benefit from whatever upside the AI outfit sees.
Musk is one of the earliest and highest-profile entrepreneurs in the AI space. Tesla, a car company he leads, is the top EV carmaker with self-driving technologies. He is also a co-founder of OpenAI, a startup in which he has invested tens of millions of dollars. Musk’s love for OpenAI has waned since: In March, he sued OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly betraying its mission statement and becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. He has also accused Google of coding bias into its AI products....
....MUCH MORE
Elon Musk's x.AI Launches
The company was formed in March so it's valuation is probably around a hundred billion or so.
Just kidding. I have no idea what sort of valuation it has been assigned. x.AI is a Nevada corporation which, as our corporate attorney readers well know, is handy as hell for a privately-held stealth company. As part of the company's coming-out I think they dropped the period in the name on the original incorporation papers.
Mr. Musk was one of the founder/funders ($100 million gift not equity) of ChatGPT parent OpenAI when it was a .org (non-profit) and seemed a bit miffed when Sam Alman hooked up with Microsoft to the tune of $10 billion.
So Elon went out and bought a garage-full of GPUs.....
Elon Musk's Grok AI Chatbot Turns On Its Creator (also Goes Woke)
"What Grok’s recent OpenAI snafu teaches us about LLM model collapse"
If interested see also Sunday's "Former Google CEO Schmidt On The Ever-Increasing Tempo Of AI".
