Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6 billion

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI announced Sunday that it has raised $6 billion, helping to close the funding gap with OpenAI, Anthropic and other competitors in the hot sector.

The funds would be used “to commercialize xAI’s first products, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies,” the company said in a statement. declarations.

Mr. Musk, who founded xAI in July, said In a social media post, the funding round valued the company at $18 billion, not including new funds. Investors included Silicon Valley heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, as well as Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Investors and big tech companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft have poured billions into companies developing AI systems, seeking to profit from their integration into many aspects of business and daily life. These investments also reflect the high costs of operating generative AI systems, which require enormous amounts of processing power to generate text, sounds and images.

In a recent research report on the latest developments in AI, Deutsche Bank analysts noted that “continuous improvements to already incredibly powerful generative AI models show how the technology has quickly become a table stakes for industry leaders.” They said major industry players could not “afford to fall behind in early scrambles before their market positions are consolidated”.

OpenAI, which unveiled chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, has nearly tripled its valuation over the past year to $80 billion, with about $13 billion in backing from Microsoft. Anthropic, founded in 2021, has raised around $8 billion, much of it from Amazon, and has reached a valuation of around $15 billion. Tech giants like Google and Meta have also spent a lot of money on their own AI technologies, which are rapidly being integrated into their product lines.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December, alleging copyright infringement over news content related to AI systems.)

Mr. Musk, who also runs Tesla, SpaceX and other companies, was a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015 but later parted ways with the company because he was disillusioned with its management – ​​and the industry of AI in general.

He sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in March, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence ahead of the public good. The same month, Mr. Musk released the raw computer code behind xAI’s chatbot, an escalation in the heated debate over whether open sourcing the code for these systems could make them more secure or encourage misuse .

Last week, during a remote appearance at a technology conference in Paris, Mr. Musk said that xAI “still has a lot of catching up to do” to be competitive with technology from OpenAI and Google. “Maybe we’ll have that towards the end of this year.”

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