I think the bad days of Elon Musk have started after the share market downfall, and now he has decided to collect $6 billion from investors for his artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI. As per a Bloomberg report, the investment round would value xAI at $18 billion.
As per the Financial Times, the Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firm Sequoia Capital has devoted itself to participating in the startup. Elon Musk has also loomed other investors who, like Sequoia Capital, contributed to his 2022 purchase of Twitter now X.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the launch of xAI in Juuly-2023 after insinuating for months that he desired to build an alternate to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. Musk was elaborate in the making of OpenAI but left its board in 2018 and has been gradually serious for the company and careful about developments around artificial intelligence in general.
After two days, during a Twitter Spaces introduction of xAI to the public, Musk said that although he gets the firm in direct rivalry with superior businesses like OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta, as well as nobodies like Anthropic, his company is taking a different method to starting its foundation model.
“AGI {Artificial General Intelligence} being physically forced is not succeeding,” Musk said, adding that while “xAI is not trying to resolve AGI on a laptop, {and} there will be heavy compute,” Musk’s team will have free supremacy to discover ideas other than climbing up the foundational model’s data limits.
In November 2023, xAI rolled out its AI model called Grok, which is available for paid users, saying on X: “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a defiant streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”
The firm added that Grok has real-time knowledge of the world thanks to the Musk-owned social media platform X; will answer “hot questions” that are disallowed by most of the other AI systems; and, upon its launch, had competencies matching those of Meta’s LLaMA 2 AI model and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.
In March this year, xAI unveiled its open-source AI model. Musk said at the time: “We are emancipating the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model. Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model skilled from scratch by xAI.”
