Bloomberg estimated xAI’s valuation at $18 billion after the investment round on Friday (April 26).
According to the Financial Times (FT), which cited the same numbers as Bloomberg, Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firm Sequoia Capital has committed to investing in the project.
According to the FT, Musk has also contacted other investors who, like Sequoia Capital, took part in his 2022 purchase of Twitter, which he then renamed X.
Musk has been implying for months that he wants to create a rival to ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI, before announcing the release of xAI in July 2030. Having participated in founding OpenAI, he stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. He has since been more critical of the business and circumspect about advances in AI generally.
Two days later, Musk declared at a Twitter Spaces public launch of xAI that although he believes the company is directly competing with both upstarts like Anthropic and larger companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, his company is establishing its foundation model differently.
Musk mentioned that although xAI is not aiming to tackle AGI on a laptop and will require significant computing power, his team will have the freedom to explore various concepts beyond just expanding the model’s data parameters.
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xAI’s Grok: The Witty AI with a Spicy Knowledge Base
During its November 2023 launch, xAI said Grok is programmed to answer inquiries with humor and defiance. They kindly advised against using it if humor is not your cup of tea!
The company added that Grok will answer “spicy questions” that most AI systems ignore, has real-time world knowledge thanks to Musk’s social media network X, and has capabilities comparable to Meta’s LLaMA 2 and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 at launch.
It was March when xAI released its open-source AI model. At the moment, Musk declared: “We are releasing the Grok-1, our huge language model, base model weights, and network architecture. Grok-1, xAI’s 314 billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, was created from scratch.
