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Artificial intelligence: Elon Musk's xAI raises $6 billion in funding to compete with OpenAI

New success for Elon Musk who, with his startup xAI, has raised 6 billion dollars in a Series B financing. The funds will be used to develop new AI products, infrastructures and technologies that are "sincere, competent and maximally beneficial for all humanity ”

Artificial intelligence: Elon Musk's xAI raises $6 billion in funding to compete with OpenAI

Elon Musk he marked a new milestone with his artificial intelligence startup, XAI, which he collected 6 billion dollars in a Series B financing backed by notable investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.

These funds will be used for bring the first products to the market of xAI, build advanced infrastructure and accelerate the research and development of new technologies. In a post on X, Musk announced that there will be further news in the coming weeks, underlining the enthusiasm and growing attention around his new initiative.

xAI: the funding context

The announcement of the Series B round represents one of the most significant investments in the artificial intelligence sector, arriving less than a year after the debut of xAI. The startup's pre-money valuation was 18 billion dollars, while the post-money valuation rose to $24 billion. Investors include major names in venture capital such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, as well as prominent figures such as Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.

xAI: Musk's mission

Elon Musk has a controversial past with artificial intelligence. Previously, had supported OpenAI, before withdrawing its support due to concerns about the potential dangers of the technology. With xAI, Musk aims to create artificial intelligence systems that they are “sincere, competent and maximally beneficial to all mankind”. xAI's stated mission is understand the true nature of the universe, an ambitious goal that reflects Musk's long-term vision for artificial intelligence.

“The best thing I can do, from an AI safety perspective, is to create one that can understand the nature of the universe. I think xAI will be in favor of humanity in this sense: humanity is much more interesting than non-humanity” Musk said in a tweet presenting his new creation.

The xAI team

Il xAI team, led by Elon Musk, is made up of 11 experts with experience in major companies of artificial intelligence such as OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research and DeepMind. Team members include Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai. One of the supervisors of xAI will be Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.

Future products and developments

Il xAI's most visible product so far is Grok, a chatbot developed as ChatGPT rival by OpenAI. Grok was trained on and integrated on the social network X (formerly Twitter). Currently, Grok-1.5 is only available to subscribers to the Premium+ version of X, while it is not yet available in Italy. With the new funding, xAI aims to bring additional products to market and build an advanced technology infrastructure to support its ambitious research and development projects.

The race for Artificial Intelligence

The race for artificial intelligence has intensified in recent years, with investors ready to fund emerging startups to compete with market leaders such as OpenAI. Microsoft has invested about 13 billion dollars in the company by Sam Altman but has also made deals with other startups such as Mistral, while Amazon ha invested approximately $4 billion in Anthropic.

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