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At the moment, Elon Musk’s xAI startup introduced a large $6 billion spherical of funding.
Confirming studies from April, the collection B funding comes from the participation of a number of identified enterprise capital corporations and traders, together with Valor Fairness Companions, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), Sequoia Capital, Constancy Administration & Analysis Firm, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others.
Musk mentioned the funding has been raised at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion.
Whereas it isn’t unusual to see huge rounds and valuations for younger startups within the AI house, this improvement is exclusive because of the sheer dimension of the capital concerned – probably one of many largest collection B investments ever made within the class.
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xAI, which has been shifting aggressively with its Grok-1 mannequin and chatbot, hopes to make use of the cash to speed up its work and higher tackle OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others within the race for synthetic generalized intelligence (AGI).
“There shall be extra to announce within the coming weeks,” Musk wrote on X.
Musk’s aggressive push with xAI and Grok
Notably, Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside its present CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman and others again in 2015 however broke with the corporate over its priorities and course in 2018, leaving it and in the end turning into one among its staunchest critics — particularly over its transfer away from open supply AI fashions and towards “closed” or proprietary fashions to which it sells entry.
Musk formally re-entered the generative AI house with the announcement of xAI in July final yr. Since then, the corporate has been shifting aggressively in direction of constructing superior AI techniques which are “truthful, competent, and maximally useful for all of humanity.”
The corporate launched Grok-1 in November 2023, saying the AI has been modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy” and might reply nearly something to help humanity in its quest for understanding and data – no matter background or political opinions.
On benchmarks reminiscent of GSM8K, HumanEval and MMLU, shared by xAI, Grok-1 outperformed Llama-2-70B and GPT-3.5 however lagged behind main fashions reminiscent of Anthropic’s Claude3, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s open supply Llama 3.
Over the next months, the corporate expanded entry to the mannequin by way of Grok chatbot – making it obtainable to paying Premium and Premium+ subscribers on Musk’s separate social community X – and highlighted the way it can present solutions utilizing the newest knowledge from X posts whereas being witty, humorous or sarcastic on the similar time. Even
Musk stored highlighting Grok’s distinctive humorousness, regardless of many flagging instances of hallucinations on the similar time.
In March this yr, the corporate once more began shifting gears. It first made Grok-1 open-source after which launched its better-performing successors — Grok-1.5 and Grok-1.5V.
Grok-1.5 launched enhanced reasoning and problem-solving capabilities and closed in on the efficiency of identified open and closed LLMs, together with GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.
In the meantime, Grok-1.5V added multimodality with the power to grasp issues seen in paperwork, diagrams, charts, screenshots and images. Across the similar time, The Data reported that the corporate is in talks with traders to lift $6 billion.
Now, with the funding formally introduced, xAI is predicted to apply it to graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters in addition to hiring to boost the capabilities of Grok.
That will make it a extra direct competitor for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which just lately received a giant improve with a brand new GPT-4o mannequin that causes throughout textual content, voice and imaginative and prescient in real-time. Google too has been pushing the bar on Gemini’s multimodal capabilities.
“xAI will proceed on this steep trajectory of progress over the approaching months, with a number of thrilling know-how updates and merchandise quickly to be introduced. The funds from the spherical shall be used to take xAI’s first merchandise to market, construct superior infrastructure and speed up the analysis and improvement of future applied sciences,” the corporate wrote in a weblog put up.
An xAI supercomputer by 2025?
Whereas it stays to be seen what updates to Grok are within the pipeline, the work on the infrastructure aspect is prone to revolve round a large supercomputer. In keeping with one other report by The Data, Musk informed traders that he desires to get this GPU cluster or “gigafactory of compute” prepared by the autumn of 2025.
The system will reportedly use Nvidia’s H100 GPUs and could be at the least 4 occasions the dimensions of the largest GPU clusters which were constructed to coach and run highly-performant AI fashions, he mentioned.
Notably, OpenAI and Microsoft are additionally reported to be planning a large AI supercomputer. In keeping with preliminary estimates, the undertaking, dubbed Stargate, will use tens of millions of specialised chips to energy OpenAI’s fashions and will price as much as $100 billion. Again in March, Musk sued OpenAI for abandoning its founding mission and turning into a closed-source de-facto subsidiary of Microsoft creating AGI for earnings fairly than the advantage of humanity.
