Elon Musk's xAI nets $6 billion in latest funding frenzy
Elon Musk's xAI nets $6 billion in latest funding frenzy
"There will be more to announce in the coming weeks," Musk said in a post on X, in response to the announcement of the funding.
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital among others, the company said in a blog post on Sunday.
The money will be used to take xAI's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure and accelerate research and development of future technologies, xAI said.
"There will be more to announce in the coming weeks," Musk said in a post on X, in response to the announcement of the funding.
The AI race has been heating up, with several investors signing big checks for start-ups looking to compete with market leaders like OpenAI.
Though xAI did not say what it was valued at after the latest round of funding, other media reports previously suggested the company would be valued at between $18 billion and $24 billion,
Last December xAI filed with the U.S. securities regulator to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering.
The company had raised $134.7 million in equity financing from a total offering amount of $1 billion, the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed.
Musk has been vocal about his plans to build safer AI. In a Twitter Spaces event earlier in the year he said that rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a "maximally curious" AI.
The billionaire, who has criticized Big Tech's AI efforts as ridden with censorship, in July launched xAI, calling it a "maximum truth-seeking AI" to rival Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI.
In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which has created a frenzy for generative AI technology around the world, but stepped down from the board in 2018.
The team behind xAI, which launched in July last year, comes from Google's DeepMind, the Windows parent, and other top AI research firms.
