xAI has filed an application for a public offering of up to $1 billion with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The company has already raised around $135 million from four investors on November 29.
Elon Musk officially launched xAI last July, saying his goal was to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Gradual rise of Elon Musk on AI
Last month, it launched Grok, a conversational chatbot service. Grok is powered by a large language model called Grok-1, designed in two months based on a first prototype. The start-up does not communicate on the number of parameters. But she assures, with a supporting comparison, that it outperforms “all other models in its class”, including GPT-3.5, in reasoning and mathematics tests.
Grok-1 is, however, less efficient than GPT-4, the latest version of the large language model developed by OpenAI, but also than Palm 2 from Google and Claude-2 from the American start-up Anthropic, which has just raised billions of dollars. extra dollars. But these models were trained with “a significantly larger amount of data and computational resources,” explains xAI.
Elon Musk also reportedly purchased thousands of high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia earlier this year to build LLMs.
Elon Musk seeks to compete with OpenAIet and Google Bard
xAI is one of several companies Musk runs, including Tesla, X, formerly Twitter, space exploration company SpaceX, underground tunnel developer Boring Company, and neuroscience startup Neuralink.
“Some of the best AI engineers and scientists in the world were willing to join a startup, but not a large, relatively well-known company like Tesla,” Elon Musk said during Tesla’s earnings presentation last July. “So I thought it would be better for them to work at a startup that I run rather than working somewhere else, and that’s how xAI was born.”
The xAI team is made up of people from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla. Members have worked on projects such as DeepMind’s AlphaGo and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.
Elon Musk seeks to compete with OpenAI and Google Bard, among others. xAI’s funding, if successful, will strengthen Elon Musk’s influence in the AI field.
Uncontrolled slippage at X (formerly Twitter)
An influence that pales in the world of social networks. A year after taking control of Twitter, now called X, advertisers are deserting the social network.
“They want to blackmail me with advertising, with money? Fuck you,” the billionaire responded last week, Wednesday, during a public interview in New York. Elon Musk was referring to the suspension, by many leading brands, of their advertising presence on X.
A first wave of advertisers took the initiative last August after the media observatory Media Matters reported advertisements from big names backed by a neo-Nazi account. Others have joined them in recent weeks, notably Apple and Disney, in reaction to a tweet from Elon Musk, which relayed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
“What will happen is that this boycott will kill the company,” warned Elon Musk. “And the whole world will know that these advertisers killed the business.
Source: ZDNET Korea