Distributes investment documents, competing with OpenAI
Values xAI at $18 billion
According to a Bloomberg report on the 12th (local time), Tesla CEO Elon Musk is seeking to raise $4 billion for his AI startup, xAI, to compete with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.
According to the report, citing documents Musk sent to investors, xAI plans to raise between $3 billion and $4 billion while valuing the company at $18 billion. The email circulating in Silicon Valley’s venture capital community about the funding reportedly included 20 pages of presentation materials.
The presentation materials actively highlight the investment point that xAI can learn from high-quality social media X (formerly Twitter) data and Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX achievements. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing a source, also reported that xAI is pushing for a $3 billion fundraising and that venture capital firm Gigafund and Steve Jurvetson, an early SpaceX investor, are considering investing.
Musk announced plans to create a new AI company in April last year and officially launched xAI three months later in July. At its launch, he stated that xAI aims to “understand the true nature of the universe.” He revealed that its team includes many members from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Tesla, which drew significant market attention. Musk has actively been searching for talent as competitors like OpenAI have offered big salaries to AI engineers.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Still, in 2018, he resigned as a board member and divested his investment in the company due to conflicts of interest related to Tesla’s AI research. Musk has since criticized OpenAI for seeking to profit from ChatGPT, saying that he intends to build “truth-seeking AI” that strives to understand the nature of the universe.
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