Elon Musk's xAI: A new player in the AI arena

Elon Musk founded xAI last summer, and The Verge just reported that the company is already causing a stir by announcing a massive $6 billion round of funding. According to the company, this money will help bring xAI's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development efforts into future technologies.

Musk's history in AI

Musk has some history in the AI space. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015, along with the current CEO, Sam Altman, and others. However, he left the company in 2018 due to disagreements over priorities and direction, particularly OpenAI's shift from open-source AI models to proprietary, closed models that sell access. Musk went on to become one of OpenAI's most vocal critics.

The rise of xAI

Fast-forward to July last year, and Musk formally re-entered the generative AI arena with the announcement of xAI. Since then, the company has been working aggressively to build advanced AI systems that they say will be “truthful, capable, and maximally beneficial to all humanity.” One of xAI's first offerings is Grok, a bolder version of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's currently only available to X Premium subscribers. According to benchmarks shared by xAI, Grok-1 outperformed models such as Llama-2-70B and GPT-3.5, but lagged behind Anthropic's Claude3, OpenAI's GPT-4, Google's Gemini, and Meta's open-source Llama 3.

Financing and plans for the future

This latest round of funding saw investments from big names, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and even Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. Last year, documents showed that xAI was looking to raise up to $1 billion in stock investments, and just a few months ago, reports came out that they had raised their goal to an impressive $6 billion - a figure Musk initially denied.

Developing the hardware that can control AI at this advanced level is no small feat and certainly costly. Last week, a report revealed that xAI would need as many as 100,000 of Nvidia's current H100 chips for a supercomputer to power an improved version of Grok, each priced between $30,000 and $40,000. Musk has ambitious plans for these powerful tools. He allegedly informed investors that the goal is to launch this new data center by autumn 2025, marking an important step forward in xAI's technology capabilities.

Conclusion

Elon Musk has contributed a lot to AI research over the years, and now his company, xAI, is at the forefront of AI developments. It will be interesting to see how these efforts develop and what contributions from xAI will have a lasting impact in the rapidly changing world of AI.