Written by Kate Conger
The unreal intelligence firm based by Elon Musk, xAI, mentioned on Monday that it had raised $6 billion, giving the startup a serious raise because it competes with rivals, together with OpenAI.
The corporate mentioned on its web site that it could use the cash to proceed constructing its infrastructure and speed up analysis and growth. BlackRock, Constancy, Sequoia Capital and others participated within the funding spherical.
“A variety of compute is required,” Musk mentioned of the funding spherical in a publish on X.
The fundraising may worth xAI at $35 billion to $40 billion, up from $24 billion earlier this yr, The New York Occasions beforehand reported.
Musk and xAI didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
Musk is attempting to play atone for AI. The billionaire, who additionally leads different firms, together with Tesla, X and SpaceX, publicly debuted xAI final yr, effectively after a growth within the AI business spawned dozens of merchandise that would create textual content, photographs and even movies.
Musk shortly constructed what he mentioned could be the world’s largest supercomputer in Memphis, which powers Grok, xAI’s chatbot. Grok is obtainable to subscribers on X.
Musk helped discovered OpenAI, however walked away from it in 2018 after disagreements with different co-founders, together with Sam Altman, its CEO.
Musk has sued OpenAI to dam it from remodeling itself from a nonprofit right into a for-profit firm, saying that Altman and one other co-founder, Greg Brockman, had breached the corporate’s founding contract by placing business pursuits earlier than the general public good. OpenAI has argued that the lawsuit is an try and hamstring the corporate whereas Musk builds a rival.
(The New York Occasions has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of stories content material associated to AI methods. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied these claims.)
Musk has argued that AI may destroy humanity, however that he has the power to construct it extra safely.
To leap-start xAI, Musk has educated its AI on information from X. A number of traders in Musk’s bid to amass X in 2022 have additionally offered funding for the AI startup, together with the enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz and the Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s funding firm, Kingdom Holding. X has raised greater than $12 billion in complete.
This text initially appeared in The New York Occasions.
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