Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, announced Sunday that it has raised $6 billion, helping close the funding gap with OpenAI, Anthropic and other rivals in the red-hot industry.
The funds would be used “to bring xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies,” the company said in a statement.
Mr. Musk, who founded xAI in July, said in a social media post that the funding round valued the company at $18 billion, not including the new money. Investors included Silicon Valley heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, as well as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.
Investors and major technology companies such as Google, Meta and Microsoft have poured billions into companies developing AI systems to benefit from their integration into many aspects of business and everyday life. These investments also reflect the high costs of operating generative AI systems, which require enormous computing power to produce text, sounds and images.
In a recent research report on the latest developments in AI, analysts at Deutsche Bank noted that “continued improvements to already strikingly powerful generative AI models demonstrate how the technology has quickly become a key focus for industry leaders,” they said , that the industry’s major players could not afford to “fall behind in the early scrum before their market positions are consolidated.”
OpenAI, which introduced the ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, has roughly tripled in value over the past year, to $80 billion, with around $13 billion in backing from Microsoft. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, has raised about $8 billion, much of it from Amazon, and reached a valuation of about $15 billion. Tech giants like Google and Meta have also invested heavily in their own AI technologies, which are quickly being integrated into their product range.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
Mr. Musk, who also runs Tesla, SpaceX and other companies, co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but later parted ways with the company because he became disillusioned with the direction of the company – and the AI industry 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 ahead of the public good in developing artificial intelligence. That same month, Mr. Musk released the raw computer code behind xAI’s chatbot, an escalation of the heated debate over whether the open-source codes of these systems could make them more secure or invite abuse.
Last week, Mr. Musk said during a remote appearance at a technology conference in Paris that xAI still has “a lot of catching up to do” to compete with technology from OpenAI and Google. “Maybe we will have that towards the end of this year.”
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2024-05-27 14:05:08
www.nytimes.com
