Elon Musk is seeking to raise 1/44 of a Twitter for his AI company, xAI. In other words, the person behind Tesla, SpaceX and X is looking for $1 billion in funding for his next enterprise.
In keeping with an SEC filing, Musk has raised about $135 million up to now from 4 unnamed investors, with the primary sale occurring on November 29. Meaning he still has about $865 million to go to satisfy his $1 billion goal.
To date, xAI is working on Grok, which is Musk’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard or Anthropic’s Claude. Per its website, Grok may have a “rebellious streak” and can answer “spicy” questions that other AI bots don’t engage with. The product has only been in development for 2 months, but will supposedly be released in beta soon to X Premium+ subscribers. A more essential differentiator for the bot is that it plans to update with real-time knowledge posted on X. But for this feature to set Grok other than the competition, it’ll need to be smart enough to tell apart between real news on X and misinformation.
Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, but stepped down from the board in 2018; currently, Musk has been critical of OpenAI, especially because it fired, then re-hired, CEO Sam Altman in November, sparking mass confusion and concern throughout the AI industry.
It’s no small feat to boost one other $865 million, but as one of the powerful people in tech, Musk is unquestionably up for the challenge… as long as potential investors haven’t been scared off by his (mis)management of X.
