London
CNN
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The AI agency based by Elon Musk has raised one other $6 billion from buyers, together with Silicon Valley enterprise capitalists and a Saudi prince, boosting its valuation to $24 billion.
Traders offering the second-round funding included Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, xAI introduced in a blog post on Sunday.
Musk, who based xAI in July final yr, wrote Monday on X that there can be “extra to announce within the coming weeks,” and that the startup had a valuation of $18 billion earlier than receiving the brand new funding.
xAI stated in its publish that the brand new cash can be used to take the agency’s “first merchandise to market, construct superior infrastructure, and speed up the analysis and growth of future applied sciences.”
The funding units the corporate up as a possible rival to OpenAI, the AI analysis group behind the wildly in style chatbot ChatGPT. Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI, however stepped down as chairman six years in the past partly over disagreements in regards to the company’s route.
In November, xAI introduced that it was creating an AI-powered chatbot referred to as “Grok” for some paying customers of X, the social media platform previously generally known as Twitter which Musk additionally owns. The billionaire stated in a post on X on the time that Grok was being skilled by having “real-time entry” to data on the location.
Since then, xAI has introduced variations of Grok 1.5 with improved lengthy context and picture capabilities, and it’s at the moment recruiting for engineers and researchers in Palo Alto, San Francisco and London.
Traders, lured by the potential for AI to revolutionize the way in which folks dwell and work, have thrown big sums of cash at AI firms in recent times.
Microsoft (MSFT) is OpenAI’s largest stakeholder, with a $13 billion investment within the agency. Final yr, Amazon (AMZN) announced it might make investments as much as $4 billion in Anthropic AI in trade for partial possession of the corporate.
Bringing AI merchandise to market is way from easy for even the most important gamers.
Earlier this month, Google launched an AI-generated search instrument, which summarizes outcomes in order that customers don’t must click on by a number of hyperlinks to get fast solutions to their questions. However the function got here beneath hearth after it provided false or misleading information, prompting the corporate to stroll again some factually incorrect outcomes.