xAI, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company founded by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, has raised £4.7 billion ($6 billion) in a new funding round.
Backers include prominent venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Kingdom Holdings.
The company said the new funding will be used to “bring xAI's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies.”
The company also said it will “continue its trajectory of rapid progress with several exciting technology updates and products coming soon over the coming months.”
xAi went public exactly one year ago, on July 13, 2023, and was founded to “understand the true nature of the universe.” The company's about page states that the startup is “primarily focused on developing advanced AI systems that are honest, competent, and of the greatest benefit to all humanity.”
Training of xAI's first flagship model, Grok, was completed about a month later, in August 2023. In November, the startup announced the early access release of its conversational AI chatbot and the Grok-1 model that powers it.
Starting this month, X (formerly Twitter) Premium users will be able to use Grok and its 1.5 model on the platform.
“I'm going to launch what I call 'TruthGPT,' which is a maximum truth-seeking AI that's trying to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson last April.
xAI was subsequently announced in July, but its founding team members have previously been involved in and led advancements in artificial intelligence such as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, as well as contributing to methods commonly used in the field.
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xAi is not the first artificial intelligence company founded by the tech entrepreneur: Musk was also a co-founder and early funder of OpenAI, which launched in late 2015. He severed ties with the company three years later.
according to SemaphoresThe split came after CEO Sam Altman and the other co-founders rejected Musk's offer to buy the company and run it himself, according to people familiar with the matter.
