xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has secured a $6 billion investment to improve its capacity to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.
This was announced in a blog post on Monday. xAI noted that the new funding will enable the firm to unveil its first products.
“The funds from the round will be used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” the firm said. “xAI is primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity. The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.”
After raising its new Series B funding from investors such as Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, Kingdom Holding, and others, the company announced it is now hiring for numerous roles.
The company said it is recruiting several engineers to fill roles in its Palo Alto, San Francisco, and UK offices.
Musk founded xAI in July 2023 and released its chatbot Grok 1.0 model in November to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Later, the company made the model available to Premium+ users, who pay $16 monthly on X. In April, the company released the new Grok 1.5 model, allowing Premium users on X to access the chatbot.
According to Musk, Grok leverages real-time access to information on X. Like ChatGPT, the model has internet browsing capabilities, enabling it to search the web for up-to-date information about specific topics.
The firm noted that this is the first of many technology updates and products to be announced soon.
