xAI, Elon Musk’s AI Venture, Raises $6 Billion to Take on OpenAI

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI, which aims to rival ChatGPT developer OpenAI, raises a massive $6 billion funding round that values ​​the 10-month-old company at a staggering $18 billion. is scheduled to be completed.

tech crunch report Reliable sources close to the deal say xAI’s funding round is expected to close in the coming weeks, giving investors a 25 percent stake in the company. Investment terms were recently adjusted upward from the original $3 billion raise at a $15 billion pre-money valuation due to strong investor demand.

Notable participants in this round include Sequoia Capital, Future Ventures (co-founded by Musk’s longtime friend Steve Jurvetson), and possibly Valor Equity Partners and Gigafund. Its founder is a member of Musk’s inner circle. Interestingly, Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) already owns a stake in xAI and will benefit from the AI ​​company’s future success.

xAI’s stated goal is to connect the digital and physical worlds by leveraging training data from Musk’s various companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company, and Neuralink. His Grok, the AI ​​startup’s chatbot, is already integrated into his X/Twitter as a paid add-on, providing mass distribution to the social network while also serving as a customer of xAI.

In Musk’s pitch to investors, Grok is being fed data from other companies that will transform the physical world in myriad ways, starting with making truly self-driving cars possible and enhancing the capabilities of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus. We envision a vast virtual cycle of mastering the following.