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Elon Musk’s xAI startup introduced a significant $6 billion spherical of funding right now.
Confirming the April report, the Sequence B funding comes from a number of outstanding enterprise capital companies 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 mentioned the funding was raised at a preliminary estimate of $18 billion.
Whereas it is not unusual to see crowdfunding rounds and valuations for younger AI startups, this growth is exclusive because of the sheer quantity of capital concerned – probably one of many largest Sequence B investments ever made on this class.
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xAI, which is making massive strides with its Grok-1 mannequin and chatbot, hopes to make use of the cash to speed up its work and higher compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others within the synthetic normal intelligence (AGI) race.
“Extra to be introduced within the coming weeks,” Musk wrote on X.
Musk’s aggressive push with xAI and Grok
Notably, Musk co-founded OpenAI with its present CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman and others in 2015, however in 2018 fell out with the corporate over its priorities and route, leaving it and ultimately changing into one in every of of its staunchest critics—particularly, due to its transfer away from open-source AI fashions to “closed” or proprietary fashions that promote entry.
Musk formally re-entered the generative synthetic intelligence area with the announcement of xAI final July. Since then, the corporate has been aggressively transferring in the direction of creating superior synthetic intelligence techniques which might be “truthful, competent, and as helpful as potential for all of humanity.”
The corporate launched Grok-1 in November 2023, claiming that the AI was modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy and will reply virtually something to assist humanity in its quest for understanding and data – no matter background or political opinions.
In benchmarks comparable to GSM8K, HumanEval and MMLU shared by xAI, Grok-1 outperformed Llama-2-70B and GPT-3.5, however fell behind main fashions comparable to Anthropic’s Claude3, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s open supply Llama. 3.
Within the months that adopted, the corporate expanded entry to the mannequin via its Grok chatbot, making it accessible to paid Premium and Premium+ subscribers on Musk’s separate X social community, and highlighted the way it might present solutions utilizing the most recent knowledge from X’s messages, whereas nonetheless being witty, humorous or sarcastic on the similar time. Even
Musk continued to emphasise Grok’s distinctive humorousness, regardless of having a number of notable situations of hallucinations on the similar time.
In March of this yr, the corporate began shifting gears once more. He first made the Grok-1 open supply, after which launched its extra environment friendly successors, the Grok-1.5 and Grok-1.5V.
Grok-1.5 launched superior reasoning and problem-solving capabilities and eclipsed the efficiency of well-known open and closed LLMs, together with Anthropic’s GPT-4 and Claude 3.
In the meantime, the Grok-1.5V added multimodality with the power to know what might be seen in paperwork, diagrams, charts, screenshots, and pictures. Across the similar time, Info reported that the corporate is in talks with buyers to lift $6 billion.
Now that the funding has been formally introduced, xAI is anticipated to leverage it on GPU clusters, in addition to rent to increase Grok’s capabilities.
This could make it a extra direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which lately obtained an enormous replace with a brand new GPT-4o mannequin that causes by textual content, voice and imaginative and prescient in real-time. Google can be pushing the bar for Gemini’s multimodal capabilities.
“xAI will proceed on this steep trajectory of progress within the coming months, with many thrilling know-how and product updates to be introduced quickly. Funds from the spherical can be used to convey the primary xAI merchandise to market, construct superior infrastructure and speed up analysis and growth of future applied sciences,” the corporate wrote in its weblog.
An xAI supercomputer by 2025?
Whereas it stays to be seen what updates are within the pipeline for Grok, the infrastructure work will probably revolve across the huge supercomputer. In response to one other report from The Info, Musk informed buyers that he desires to have this GPU cluster or “computing gigafactory” prepared by the autumn of 2025.
The system will reportedly use Nvidia H100 GPUs and can be no less than 4 occasions the dimensions of the biggest GPU clusters constructed to coach and run high-performance synthetic intelligence fashions, he mentioned.
It ought to be famous that OpenAI and Microsoft are additionally planning to create an enormous supercomputer with synthetic intelligence. Dubbed Stargate, the challenge will use thousands and thousands of specialised chips to energy OpenAI fashions and will value as much as $100 billion, based on preliminary estimates. Again in March, Musk sued OpenAI for abandoning its founding mission and changing into a de facto closed-source subsidiary of Microsoft, growing AGI for revenue somewhat than the nice of humanity.
