Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, has raised billions of dollars from investors as it continues to mount a challenge to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT.
Early Monday, the startup behind the Grok AI chatbot announced it had secured $6 billion in funding from investors in a Series B round. Some investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Valor Equity Partners.
Last year, The Dallas Express reported that Elon Musk was undertaking yet another massive project with the launch of his AI startup. At the time, Musk was seen pulling in some of the industry’s top talent, including former Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI employees.
Ironically, Musk himself is a co-founder and financial backer of OpenAI. However, in recent years, he has criticized the company.
“It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open-source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source,” Musk told CNBC in 2023.
According to Musk, xAI’s pre-money valuation was $18 billion. The Series B funding “will be used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” says the company.
Since taking over Twitter and renaming it X, Musk has made his distaste for what he sees as out-of-control ‘wokeness’ abundantly clear. He complained that OpenAI was infected with the “woke mind virus.” When Google’s AI platform Gemini produced images with an anti-white bias, Musk said he was happy the massive search engine provider finally revealed its true colors.
“I’m glad that Google overplayed their hand with their AI image generation, as it made their insane racist, anti-civilizational programming clear to all,” said Musk.