Elon Musk’s synthetic intelligence startup xAI has raised $6 billion in a Series B funding spherical, which is seen because the acceleration of the corporate’s efforts to push ahead within the heating AI race and to problem market rivals reminiscent of OpenAI.
The Series B funding spherical of $6 billion got here lower than a yr after the corporate’s debut in July 2023 and was backed by buyers together with Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, amongst others, xAI stated in a weblog submit on Sunday.
The cash will probably be used to carry xAI’s first merchandise to market, construct superior infrastructure and speed up analysis and improvement of future applied sciences, xAI stated.
The xAI startup launched the Grok chatbot, which was skilled to be built-in into the X platform, which Musk additionally owns.
In a weblog submit on Sunday, the corporate touted the developments of the xAI, citing the current bulletins of the improved Grok-1.5 mannequin with lengthy context functionality and Grok-1.5V with picture understanding.
“There will be more to announce in the coming weeks,” Musk stated in a submit on X, previously Twitter, in response to the funding announcement.
“Pre-money valuation was $18B,” he famous.
The AI race has been heating up, with a number of buyers signing massive checks for startups trying to compete with market leaders like OpenAI. Tech large Microsoft has invested about $13 billion in OpenAI, whereas e-commerce large Amazon backed Anthropic with $4 billion in funding.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 however left in 2018, later saying he was uncomfortable with the profit-driven course the corporate was taking underneath the management of CEO Sam Altman.
Source: www.dailysabah.com