Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6B to tackle OpenAI
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As we speak, Elon Musk’s xAI startup introduced an enormous $6 billion spherical of funding.
Confirming experiences from April, the collection B funding comes from the participation of a number of recognized enterprise capital corporations and buyers, together with Valor Fairness Companions, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), Sequoia Capital, Constancy Administration & Analysis Firm, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others.
Musk stated the funding has been raised at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion.
Whereas it’s not unusual to see huge rounds and valuations for younger startups within the AI area, this growth is exclusive as a result of sheer measurement of the capital concerned – probably one of many largest collection B investments ever made within the class.
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xAI, which has been transferring aggressively with its Grok-1 mannequin and chatbot, hopes to make use of the cash to speed up its work and higher tackle OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others within the race for synthetic generalized intelligence (AGI).
“There will probably be extra to announce within the coming weeks,” Musk wrote on X.
Musk’s aggressive push with xAI and Grok
Notably, Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside its present CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman and others again in 2015 however broke with the corporate over its priorities and route in 2018, leaving it and in the end turning into one in all its staunchest critics — particularly over its transfer away from open supply AI fashions and towards “closed” or proprietary fashions to which it sells entry.
Musk formally re-entered the generative AI area with the announcement of xAI in July final 12 months. Since then, the corporate has been transferring aggressively in direction of constructing superior AI techniques which can be “truthful, competent, and maximally useful for all of humanity.”
The corporate launched Grok-1 in November 2023, saying the AI has been modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy” and might reply nearly something to help humanity in its quest for understanding and information – no matter background or political opinions.
On benchmarks equivalent to GSM8K, HumanEval and MMLU, shared by xAI, Grok-1 outperformed Llama-2-70B and GPT-3.5 however lagged behind main fashions equivalent to Anthropic’s Claude3, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s open supply Llama 3.
Over the following months, the corporate expanded entry to the mannequin through Grok chatbot – making it accessible to paying Premium and Premium+ subscribers on Musk’s separate social community X – and highlighted the way it can present solutions utilizing the newest knowledge from X posts whereas being witty, humorous or sarcastic on the similar time. Even
Musk stored highlighting Grok’s distinctive humorousness, regardless of many flagging circumstances of hallucinations on the similar time.
In March this 12 months, the corporate once more began shifting gears. It first made Grok-1 open-source after which launched its better-performing successors — Grok-1.5 and Grok-1.5V.
Grok-1.5 launched enhanced reasoning and problem-solving capabilities and closed in on the efficiency of recognized open and closed LLMs, together with GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.
In the meantime, Grok-1.5V added multimodality with the flexibility to grasp issues seen in paperwork, diagrams, charts, screenshots and images. Across the similar time, The Data reported that the corporate is in talks with buyers to lift $6 billion.
Now, with the funding formally introduced, xAI is anticipated to apply it to graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters in addition to hiring to reinforce the capabilities of Grok.
That might make it a extra direct competitor for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which just lately obtained an enormous improve with a brand new GPT-4o mannequin that causes throughout textual content, voice and imaginative and prescient in real-time. Google too has been pushing the bar on Gemini’s multimodal capabilities.
“xAI will proceed on this steep trajectory of progress over the approaching months, with a number of thrilling expertise updates and merchandise quickly to be introduced. The funds from the spherical will probably be used to take xAI’s first merchandise to market, construct superior infrastructure and speed up the analysis and growth of future applied sciences,” the corporate wrote in a weblog publish.
An xAI supercomputer by 2025?
Whereas it stays to be seen what updates to Grok are within the pipeline, the work on the infrastructure facet is more likely to revolve round an enormous supercomputer. In response to one other report by The Data, Musk instructed buyers that he desires to get this GPU cluster or “gigafactory of compute” prepared by the autumn of 2025.
The system will reportedly use Nvidia’s H100 GPUs and can be not less than 4 instances the dimensions of the largest GPU clusters which have been constructed to coach and run highly-performant AI fashions, he stated.
Notably, OpenAI and Microsoft are additionally reported to be planning an enormous AI supercomputer. In response to preliminary estimates, the venture, dubbed Stargate, will use thousands and thousands of specialised chips to energy OpenAI’s fashions and will value as much as $100 billion. Again in March, Musk sued OpenAI for abandoning its founding mission and changing into a closed-source de-facto subsidiary of Microsoft growing AGI for earnings slightly than the advantage of humanity.
