Elon Musk’s xAI Aims to Raise $1 Billion

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, aims to raise $1 billion in funding from equity investors.

Musk has already raised nearly $135 million, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Dec. 5), citing a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Musk created xAI this year to compete with other generative AI companies, such as OpenAI, where Musk was a co-founder, according to the report.

The company has already released one product, a chatbot called Grok, which is trained on data from the X social network, also owned by Musk, the report said. Grok is designed to answer questions with wit and has a rebellious streak.

In November, Musk announced that equity investors in X would own 25% of xAI, per the report. He also revealed that users of the social network who sign up for for its Premium+ subscription will gain access to Grok.

Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI, the highest-profile AI startup and developer of ChatGPT, especially after it created a for-profit arm that he believes is “effectively controlled by Microsoft,” according to the report. Microsoft has invested around $13 billion into OpenAI.

Despite his involvement in AI, Musk has expressed reservations about the technology, the report said. In March, he joined a group of researchers and tech industry leaders in calling for a pause in the training of powerful AI models. Musk also questioned the reason for Sam Altman’s brief ouster from OpenAI and whether the board had discovered something dangerous about the technology.

Musk announced the launch of xAI in June, saying it would bring together a team of AI industry veterans and seek to “understand reality.”

The firm rolled out Grok in November, saying that the AI chatbot has capabilities that rival Meta’s LLaMA 2 AI model and can handle math problems and reasoning at a level approaching that of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.

The news of xAI’s aim to raise funding comes a day after it was reported that French AI startup Mistral AI is set to raise about $487 million in its latest funding round. The round is expected to value the firm at around $2 billion, making it a strong competitor to OpenAI.