The interest in funding AI startups continues unabated. Today, xAI, the generative AI company created by former OpenAI founder and later critic Elon Musk, announced it has raised an impressive $6 billion in a Series B funding round.
In a blog post, the company stated some of the people and groups that put money into this funding round included "g Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding."
Musk, who is also the owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), left OpenAI in 2018, a few years after it was founded. He has since been publicly critical of OpenAI, and in March, he filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming it had breached its contract to be a non-profit company.
Musk first announced xAI in July 2023. He launched the first version of its AI chatbot, Grok, in November 2023 to a limited number of users. Grok is now available for X users if they sign up for a premium plan. In April, XAI released the latest version of the chatbot, Grok-1.5V, which added vision features in addition to text prompt support.
Today's blog post stated that xAI has "multiple exciting technology updates and products" in the works that will be revealed in the near future. It added:
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.
A recent, but so far unconfirmed, report claims that xAI is working on the next version of Grok and that it is developing a new supercomputer to power its functions. The plan is for the supercomputer to become operational by the end of 2025, and it will need clusters of Nvidia H100 GPUs that will be four times the size of similar AI GPU clusters that are available today.
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