Billion dollars for xAi
Musk strikes out against OpenAI
April 12, 2024, 3:13 p.m
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Elon Musk and his company xAI have long since entered the race for AI supremacy. Now the tech billionaire apparently wants to overtake the top dog OpenAI. He promotes his business model to investors. The goal: a billion-dollar financing round.
When the AI startup OpenAI initiated the technical revolution of generative artificial intelligence with its chatbot ChatGPT at the end of 2022, it triggered a veritable investor frenzy in this emerging technology sector. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has long since entered the race for supremacy with his AI company xAI. Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015. But three years later he fell out with the company and left again.
Musk’s company is a declaration of war on the big AI players. She is committed to the development of a so-called General Artificial Intelligence (“Artificial General Intelligence” or AGI for short) – an AI that, unlike chatbots like ChatGPT, can keep up with the human mind. “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” Musk once tweeted.
According to media reports, in order to keep up with the AI top dog OpenAI, Musk is in talks with investors. They are supposed to help xAi with three billion dollars in a financing round, reported the “Wall Street Journal” and “Bloomberg”. This would value xAI at $18 billion. The venture capital company Gigafund and Steve Jurvetson are said to be among the backers, according to informants who cite the “WSJ” and “Bloomberg”. Emails about the potential funding, including a roughly 20-page pitch deck, a brief presentation of the business idea, are circulating among venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, Bloomberg quoted a person who received the email as saying.
The pitch deck highlights Musk’s track record at Tesla and SpaceX as potential selling points for investors. It further argues that xAI will be able to train on the high-quality data from Musk’s social network X. Access to data is crucial for building large language models that power AI chatbots – an area where xAI aims to compete with other well-funded companies like OpenAI. The software giant Microsoft should 13 billion invested in the Silicon Valley darling.
Multi-billionaire Musk has repeatedly warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and even described AI as “our greatest existential threat.” According to his prediction, an AI will be more intelligent than the most intelligent human by as early as 2025 or 2026. According to Musk’s own statement, xAi is about ensuring the security of the technology. “The safest way to build an AI is to build one that is maximally curious and truth-seeking,” said the entrepreneur in an online talk on Twitter. Such an AI would be more interested in humanity than destroying it.