In the latest demonstration that the artificial intelligence gold rush shows no signs of slowing, Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has announced it has raised a modest $6 billion, which in today’s tech terms is essentially pocket change with a few extra zeros. The company plans to use the funding for what it describes as bringing its first products to market, building advanced infrastructure and, perhaps most ambitiously, accelerating the development of AI systems that are, as Musk put it, “truthful, competent and maximally beneficial.” One assumes that somewhere on that list is also teaching AI not to confuse an orange for an ostrich.
The impressive pile of cash comes from a cadre of investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Fidelity, all of whom apparently still believe in betting heavily on anything involving Elon Musk, even if it is a company that sounds like a file format from 1996. The announcement was made Sunday, timed just before the stock market resumes its waltz and gives investors something to nervously refresh their browsers about.
xAI, for those just catching up, is Musk’s answer to OpenAI, the company he helped found and then became vocally disenchanted with after it began cozying up to Microsoft like an AI-loving slumber party. In classic Muskian fashion, he decided to build his own rival from scratch because why fuss over disagreements when you can just build a potentially world-altering technology to prove a point.
The company is currently best known for Grok, its chatbot that, in case you missed the memo, is available on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought, rebranded and somewhat enthusiastically torched. Grok tries to differentiate itself from other AI assistants by having a personality described as “wittier and more rebellious” than your average chatbot, which is a polite way of saying it occasionally cracks jokes that sound like an AI binge-watched stand-up comedians from 2004.
This funding round brings xAI’s valuation to $24 billion, which is what happens when a company hasn’t yet made a product you can buy but has a Twitter account and a few philosophical musings about the nature of truth. Never one to miss a brand synergy, Musk has said that xAI will work tightly with X, Tesla and his other companies, because nothing says cutting-edge AI development like multitasking across online arguments and electric vehicles.
“There will be more to announce in the coming weeks,” Musk teased, in what we can only assume is Silicon Valley’s version of suspenseful foreshadowing.
In the end, xAI says its mission is to understand the universe, which is ambitious even by Elon Musk standards, though one might argue that a good AI understanding the DMV could already qualify as a historic breakthrough.
For now, it remains to be seen whether Grok and its future cousins will usher in a new era of artificial wisdom or simply become very expensive improv comedians.
After all, in Musk’s universe, the future may be artificial, but the drama is very, very real.