Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and business magnate, has raised $6 billion for his artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI. The funding round was led by Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding. Musk's xAI aims to develop 'truthful' AI systems and take its first set of products to market. The company plans to use the funds for advanced infrastructure development and research and development of future technologies.
Musk, who is known for his involvement in Tesla, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and other tech companies, has been an early supporter of artificial intelligence. He had previously backed OpenAI before it introduced ChatGPT in late 2022. However, Musk's relationship with OpenAI soured when he sued the company and its co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly betraying its mission statement and becoming a 'closed-source de facto subsidiary' of Microsoft.
xAI was founded just last year and has already made strides in the field. The company released its chatbot Grok 1.0 model on X, a social network owned by Musk, in November 2023. It later made the model available to Premium users for $16 a month and introduced Grok 1.5 with multimodal capabilities in April.
The company's goal of developing 'truthful' AI systems is significant as there have been concerns about the accuracy and reliability of some AI models, including ChatGPT, which has been criticized for generating misleading information.
Musk's xAI is not the only player in the field. Meta, another tech giant, is reportedly in talks to partner with chatbot group Character.ai to develop AI tools.
The $6 billion funding round marks one of the larger investments in the nascent field of developing AI tools and positions xAI as a formidable competitor in the space.
