Elon Musk’s start-up xAI seeks to raise $1bn

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Covenant Umoru

Elon Musk, the visionary entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla, is once again making waves in the tech world with his latest venture, xAI. The start-up aims to raise a staggering $1 billion in funding to develop artificial intelligence technologies that can not only match but surpass human capabilities. Musk has long been a vocal advocate for the responsible development of AI, and his foray into this space represents a significant step forward in creating machines that can outperform humans in various domains. According to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company is looking for a total of $1 billion in equity financing, having already raised $135 million (£107 million) from investors.

The ambitious goal of xAI is to create AI systems that possess general intelligence, enabling them to understand and solve problems beyond the capabilities of human intelligence. Musk believes that such a breakthrough is crucial for humanity’s future, as it could potentially address complex issues like climate change, healthcare, and alternative energy. The $1 billion funding sought by xAI underscores the scale and ambition of Musk’s vision, as the collaboration of top AI researchers and scientists requires significant financial backing.

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Following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November of last year, the competition to create generative AI products—that is, products that produce convincing text, image, and audio from basic prompts—has heated up as the largest companies in Silicon Valley vie for supremacy.

After the sensational impact of that chatbot, Microsoft announced a deepening of its partnership with OpenAI in January backed by a $10bn investment. Three years after joining OpenAI as a co-founder in 2015, Musk—the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and the owner of the X platform, formerly known as Twitter—left the company. Musk established xAI in July, and the business unveiled Grok, a chatbot with a “rebellious streak,” as its first AI model, last month.

X Premium subscribers who meet certain requirements will have access to Grok. Musk stated last month that platform investors would hold a quarter of xAI. The billionaire has cautioned that artificial intelligence (AI) may pose “one of the biggest threats to humanity,” though. Amazon has also entered the AI race, announcing in September that it is to invest up to $4bn in the startup Anthropic, which has created its own generative AI chatbot called Claude.