Elon Musk's AI Startup X.AI Hopes to Raise $1 Billion in Equity Offering

06 Dec 2023, 17:50 by Lucas Nolan · Breitbart

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, X.AI, has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion through an equity offering.

CNBC reports that Elon Musk is steering his AI startup, X.AI, towards a significant financial milestone. The company, which Musk announced in July, aims to explore the “true nature of the universe” and has already raised nearly $135 million from four investors since its first investment round on November 29.

Elon Musk’s X logo for Twitter (Anadolu Agency/Getty)

X.AI recently made headlines with the release of its chatbot, Grok, modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Grok, boasting two months of training and real-time internet knowledge, is “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!” X.AI wrote on its website, adding, “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

The ambitious fundraising target puts X.AI in direct competition with other major players in the AI field, including OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and other companies like Google and Anthropic. This move indicates a significant expansion in Musk’s portfolio, which already includes Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink.

Musk said that investors in X/Twitter will receive a 25 percent share in X.AI. “We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission,” X.AI says on its website.

X.AI’s team comprises alumni from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla, with experience on projects like AlphaCode and GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

On a Tesla earnings call in July, Musk told investors that X.AI will not compete with any of Tesla’s business, stating: “There were just some of the world’s best AI engineers and scientists that were willing to join a startup but they were not willing to join a large, sort of relatively established company like Tesla. So I was like, OK well, better it’s a startup that I run than they go work somewhere else. That’s kind of the genesis of X.AI.”