Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI is raising $6 billion at a valuation of $18 billion, according to a report by The Information. The funding round will see participation from Sequoia Capital and Future Ventures, the venture capital fund started by Musk’s friend and SpaceX board member, Steve Jurvetson. The deal is expected to close within the next few weeks. Other participants include Valor Equity Partners and Gigafund, who are also a part of Musk’s inner circle.
For the fundraising, Musk has reportedly pitched a system where all his companies function as a network . A TechCrunch report has revealed that all of Musk’s companies are interlinked with each other - training data is being collected from Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Boring Company while microblogging platform, X has already integrated xAI’s chatbot, Grok on the platform for premium X users.
Grok, will run on the data from the other companies, and grow from there on and potentially benefit Tesla’s self-driving cars which run on a combination of artificial intelligence technologies as well as the humanoid robot that Tesla is building, Optimus.
X also owns a stake in xAI which means that growth in the AI startup would automatically help the social media platform’s case.
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Just last month, Musk open-sourced Grok-1, xAI latest version of their AI chatbot. Musk’s rivalry with OpenAI has played out publicly for long with Musk suing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for betraying the original non-profit mission of the AI firm.
