xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has raised $6 billion in its latest funding round, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company has received $12 billion in funding in 2018, with all that capital coming from former investors like Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Fidelity and Nvidia.
The money will be tapped to go towards xAI’s development of its generative AI projects, namely its flagship AI model, Grok. xAI is placed in a position to compete versus leaders of the industry like OpenAI and Anthropic by optimizing its ecosystem and extending this to become a leader in this rapidly emerging AI sector.
Some of the more salient xAI offerings, leveraging the Grok AI model, are a chatbot available publicly on X (formerly Twitter) to free users and premium users. Flux generator, visual analysis and summarizing trending news are among Grok’s capabilities that include generating images.
xAI Expands Grok AI’s Reach with API and iOS App
In October, xAI released an API so developers could run Grok on third party platforms and also released a standalone iOS app for testing. These are important moves that truly extend the model’s reach and are applicable on many more problems.
In order to drive its ambitious goals xAI has set up a state of the art data center in Memphis, equipped with 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. The facility was built in only 122 days and runs on diesel generators, whilst plans are afoot to double capacity by 2025. Furthermore, Tesla’s advanced infrastructure will also benefit via integration of xAI’s innovations into the autonomous driving technologies.
However, xAI is fighting against stiff competition from rivals OpenAI and Anthropic that each attracted huge backing. Elon Musk had filed a lawsuit earlier this month against Microsoft and OpenAI accusing the two of anti-competitive practices in response to the competitive landscape.
OpenAI pushed investors to avoid giving funding to competitors like xAI, according to the lawsuit, and Microsoft’s $13 billion investment into OpenAI caused market manipulation, The lawsuit claims. Other industry leaders, such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have chimed in to draw attention to the controversy by calling for stricter oversight of nonprofits who are moving to for profit statuses.
The both, namely Zuckerberg and Musk, have asked for an investigation into OpenAI’s financial practices, alleging it was misusing tax exempted fund. As xAI continues to expand the boundaries of AI development, its work illustrates the hot war for generative AI supremacy heating up.
