Elon Musk’s OpenAI competitor is preparing to raise big money from Silicon Valley.
According to new, anonymous reports from The information And TechCrunchMusk’s AI company xAI is currently raising $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, and the deal is expected to close in a few weeks.
According to the report, if you are a paying X user, Elon Musk wants his Grok AI to write your posts for you
Musk’s 10-month-old AI company wants to acquire OpenAI after Musk openly criticized and argued with the AI giant he co-founded. Musk has long criticized OpenAI’s change in ethos, criticizing the company’s transition from an open, nonprofit model to a more secretive, for-profit approach.
Musk and his associates have reportedly pitched investors xAI as an AI brand that will one day be integrated into Musk’s various companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink. TechCrunch reports that the presentation claims that xAI will be different from other AI companies because it will “dominate the physical world.” The pitch is that xAI can one day train on data from all of Musk’s companies and then help Tesla develop (not yet existing) fully self-driving cars and its (still underdeveloped) Optimus robot.
Destructible speed of light
It should come as no surprise that Musk has no problem raising big money from tech venture capitalists. Musk has many friends in Silicon Valley, and although his reputation has suffered recently, friendly VC firms have long been part of his support network. As TechCrunch notes, one of the participants in this funding round is Future Ventures, co-founded by Musk’s old partner Steve Jurvetson.
However, as xAI prepares to raise billions of dollars, it is important to note that it is currently the only real product Grok, the AI chatbot integrated into Musk’s social media company X, formerly known as Twitter. And as Mashable and other media outlets have reported, Grok isn’t actually that good. Just recently, the AI chatbot couldn’t tell the difference between real messages and messages a joke, and reported a humorous post as real legitimate news. Grok recently too invented a fake story about Iran attacking Tel Aviv with missiles, which X then presented to its hundreds of millions of users.
But regardless of Grok’s mistakes, Musk is using the hype around xAI to save X. According to TechCrunch owns