Elon Musk’s ambitious AI company, xAI, responsible for making the chatbot Grok, plans to secure up to $1 billion in funding rounds. This equates to 1/44 of X’s valuation, which Musk took over last year in October. The social network’s valuation has now dropped significantly.
Per a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk has successfully garnered approximately $135 million from four undisclosed investors, the initial transaction dating back to November 29, meaning he still has about $865 million remaining to achieve his target of $1 billion.
For now, xAI has only unveiled one product, which is the AI chatbot Grok, meant to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Anthropic’s Claude, and many others. xAI’s initial mission had been targeted towards “understanding the universe with AI” to help humans comprehend mysterious phenomena such as dark matter and black holes, but it seems to be deviating from that goal with Grok, which seems to have little to do with space.
Grok has only been in development for two months, but its beta version is already planned to roll out soon to the highest-paid tier of users on X called Premium+. Unlike rival chatbots, Grok will be able to look through real-time information on X, and as alarming as that sounds, Musk claims that the AI will be smart enough to distinguish between misinformation and real news.
Securing an additional $865 million is a significant undertaking, yet Musk, as a leading figure in the tech world, is likely well-equipped for the task. This assumes, of course, that prospective investors are not deterred by his controversial handling of X.
Musk was originally a co-founder of ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI but resigned from the board in 2018. More recently, he has criticized the governance at OpenAI due to the sudden ouster of its renowned CEO, Sam Altman.
Altman was removed from the company via its board of directors for a “lack of consistently candid communication”, but he has now been reinstated to his original position alongside others who had left the company including co-founder Greg Brockman. This move caused mass confusion and concern in the AI industry as well as OpenAI’s biggest investors.
