According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup Xai is gearing up for a major funding push that could surpass $20 billion.
The new round pushed Xai’s valuation over $120 billion and made a major leap for the company just four months after closing its $6 billion Series C backed by heavyweight Cs such as Andreessen Horowitz, A16Z, BlackRock and Fidelity Management & Research Company.
“In consultation with investors, Xai Holdings from Elon Musk will raise approximately $20 billion in funding for a newly combined artificial intelligence startup and social media business,” Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the ongoing talk.
In a recent call with Xai investors, Musk did not directly mention the new funding round, but said it was likely to come soon, saying “I spoke to Faber to a source familiar with the matter.” Bloomberg added, the exact amount is still in the air.
The news also follows Xai’s move after it acquired Xai’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter). In all-stock trading valued Xai at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. Sources told CNBC earlier this month that Musk was trying to assign “appropriate value” to Xai.
“Xai and X’s futures are intertwined. Today we have officially taken a step towards combining data, models, calculations, distributions and talent,” Musk says on X, announcing the trade.
Musk launched Xai in July 2023 and explores the deepest mystery of the universe with a goal that sounds straight from a sci-fi novel. His team includes heavy hitters from Google Deepmind, Openai, Microsoft Research and Tesla. This is the engineers and scientists behind breakthroughs like Alphacode and GPT-3.5/4.
Musk appears to be intended to turn Xai into a heavyweight competitor to established players such as Openai, Google, and humanity, with everyone creating key names around the flagship AI model.
Launched by Musk in July 2023, Zai has fulfilled its mission to explore the deepest mysteries of the universe. The Xai team includes top talent from companies such as Google Deepmind, Openai, Microsoft Research, and Tesla. This drives advances in Deepmind’s Alphacode and Openai’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Musk appears to position Xai as a terrifying player in the AI space, each aiming to compete with giants such as Openai, Google and Anthropic, known for their flagship AI models.
Musk co-founded Openai in 2015, but left the board in 2018, and has since expressed skepticism about the direction of big technology in AI, citing concerns about potential censorship. Musk’s recent AI vision includes “truth-focused” AI designed to counter products such as Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI by exploring basic truths about the universe.
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