Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence business, X.AI, has submitted an SEC filing seeking an equity sale of up to $1 billion. The business has raised approximately $135 million from four investors, with the initial sale taking place on November 29th. According to the filing, a “binding and enforceable agreement” is in place for the acquisition of the remaining shares.
According to its website, Musk’s artificial intelligence business aims to “understand the true nature of the universe,” as stated in July. The X.AI chatbot Grok was launched last month; the company claims it was inspired by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The business asserts that the chatbot, which underwent two months of training before its launch, possesses real-time online expertise. “If you dislike humor, you might want to avoid using Grok because it is designed to answer questions with a touch of wit and has a bit of a rebellious streak!” “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems,” X.AI claimed on its website.
Grok is X.AI’s way of taking on firms like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, which Musk co-founded but left in 2018 because of a disagreement with co-founder Sam Altman. It will compete in this space along with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot and Google’s Bard technology. Musk allegedly bought thousands of powerful GPUs—the chips needed to construct a huge language model—from Nvidia earlier this year. Musk owns or leads numerous companies, X.AI being only one of them. Musk is the chief executive officer of three companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and X, which was once Twitter and which he acquired last year. Neuralink, a brain-tech business, and Boring Company, a developer of underground tunnels, are both run by him. Musk said last month that X (the former Twitter) investors will control 25% of X.AI. “We will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission,” X.AI writes on its website, even though it is a different company from X Corp.
Participants in X.AI come from various backgrounds, including former employees of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Tesla. According to their LinkedIn accounts, they have contributed to many initiatives, such as AlphaCode by DeepMind and the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots by OpenAI. Reports indicate that in March, Musk formed X.AI in Nevada.
If you were wondering whether X.AI could compete with any of Tesla’s businesses, here’s what Musk told analysts during a July earnings call: “There were just a handful of the most brilliant minds in artificial intelligence (AI) that were open to working for a fledgling company rather than a huge, more established one like Tesla,” he explained. Since they were leaving, It is figured it was for the best that it was a startup I was running. That’s where X.AI was born.
At the 2023 DealBook Summit, Musk urged advertisers whose X ads had been suspended to “go f*** yourself.” This statement was made at the same time as the inaugural sale of X.AI, which occurred on the same day as the financing for the platform. In the aftermath of Musk’s antisemitic posts and magnified comments, X lost dozens of advertisers.
