X.AI, a company founded by ElonMuskFoundedArtificial Intelligence Startups, has filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)Plans to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering.
According to the documentation,The company has raised nearly $135 million from four investors.firstThe sale took place on November 29, and already has a "binding and enforceable agreement" to purchase the remaining shares.
The AI startup, announced by Musk in July, aims to "understand the true nature of the universe.", its website states. Last month, X.AI released a chatbot called Grok, which the company claims is modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Grok chatbot was trained for two months and, the company claims, has real-time internet knowledge.
“Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of humor and a bit of a rebellious streak, so if you hate humor, don’t use it!” X.AI writes on its website. “It will also answer tough questions that most other AI systems reject,” the company adds.
With Grok, X.AI aims to compete directly with companies including ChatGPT creator OpenAIMusk helped found OpenAI but left the project in 2018 amid clashes with co-founder Sam Altman. It will also compete with Google’s Bard technology and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.
Earlier this year, Musk reportedly acquired thousands of high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia, chips that are essential for building large language models.
X.AI is one of many companies owned or led by Musk. In addition to controlling X (and formerly Twitter, which he bought last year), Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. He also runs underground tunnel developer The Boring Company and brain-tech startup Neuralink.
last month,Musk said that investors in X (formerly Twitter) will own shares in X.AI 25%.
"We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and others to achieve our mission," X.AI says on its website.
Those working at X.AI include former employees of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla.According to their LinkedIn profile, they have worked on projects such as DeepMind's AlphaCode and OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots..
Musk founded X.AI in Nevada in March, according to documents.
During Tesla’s earnings call in July, Musk told analysts that X.AI could potentially compete with Tesla’s business, saying:There are some in the worldOptimalI was looking for talented AI engineers and scientists who wanted to join a startup, but they didn’t want to join a relatively mature company like Tesla. So I thought, well, it would be better for them to join a startup I run than to work somewhere else. That was the origin of X.AI..
Regarding X.AI’s financing,firstThe sale of the stake coincides with Musk’s appearance at the 2023 DealBook Summit, where he told advertisers who had paused their campaigns on X to “f**k off.” Dozens of advertisers stopped spending on X after Musk tweeted and amplified anti-Semitic comments.