Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI is reportedly close to raising $6 billion from investors.
Bloomberg reported on Friday (April 26) that the funding round will be valued at $18 billion.
Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firm Sequoia Capital has committed to invest in the startup, according to the Financial Times (FT), which reported the same figures as Bloomberg.
Musk has also approached other investors who participated in his 2022 acquisition of Twitter, such as Sequoia Capital, which he later renamed X, the FT reported.
Musk announced the launch of xAI in July 2023 after months of hinting that he wanted a replacement for OpenAI's AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. He was involved in the creation of OpenAI but left its board in 2018 and has been increasingly critical of the company and generally cautious about developments around AI.
Two days later, during a public introduction of xAI during Twitter Spaces, Musk said that when he sees the firm competing directly with big businesses like OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta, as well as upstarts like Anthropic I am looking at, his firm has a different approach to establish its base model.
“A.G.I [artificial general intelligence] Musk said coercion isn't going to succeed, adding that while “xAI isn't trying to solve AGI on a laptop, [and] would be computationally heavy,” his team would have free reign to explore ideas other than increasing the data parameters of the basic model.
In November 2023, xAI introduced its own AI model called Grok, stating on its website: “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of common sense and has a rebellious style, so if you hate humor If you do, please don't use it!”
Grok has real-time knowledge of the world thanks to X, the social media platform owned by Musk, the company added. It will answer “spicy questions” that are dismissed by other AI systems. And at launch it had capabilities to compete with Meta's LLaMA 2 AI model and OpenAI's GPT-3.5.
In March, xAI unveiled its open-source AI model. Musk said at the time: “We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of our large language model Grok-1. Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter mixture of experts model trained from scratch by xAI. Is.