Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has announced its latest series B funding round of $6 billion. The round was led by VC firms including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, among others.
xAI says this additional capital will help bring its product to market and help in its acceleration efforts. “The funds from the 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 company shares in the announcement blog.
The AI company was founded last July with a mission to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website. xAI has since announced two products: Grok – an AI conversational chatbot and an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for prompt engineering. The company says that more products and updates will be coming soon including a multimodal Grok.
Grok was launched in November as an “answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT” following Musk’s criticism of the recent “closedness” nature of OpenAI – a company he co-founded in 2015.
Musk co-founded OpenAI together with its CEO Sam Altman, its president Greg Brockman, and AI researcher Ilya Sutskever amongst others to develop AI safely in “a way that would benefit humanity as a whole.” Musk later fell out with the company’s leadership and resigned from the company in 2018. He has since criticized the arguing that the company should be more open – like its name implies.
In the spirit of advocating for open development of AI models, Grok’s foundational model was open-sourced in March.
Grok has been touted as a witty AI assistant with a dash of rebellion. It is deeply integrated into X (the platform that is no longer Twitter) and is currently available to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers.
