X.AI, the artificial intelligence startup founded by Elon Musk, has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to raise $1 billion in an equity offering.
The company has already raised nearly $135 million from four investors, with the first sale on Nov. 29, and has a “binding and legally binding” agreement to buy the remaining shares, the filing said.
The artificial intelligence startup Musk announced in July aims to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website. latest month,X.AI released a chatbot called Grok, which the company says is modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The chatbot debuted after two months of training and has real-time internet knowledge, the company claims.
” Grok is designed to answer questions with wit and has a rebellious band, so please do not use it if you detest humor! X.AI wrote on its website, adding: “It will also answer the burning questions that most other AI systems reject.”
The company didn’t incontinently respond to a request for comment.
With Grok, X.AI aims to compete directly with companies including ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which Musk helped create before a conflict with co-founder Sam Altman forced him to leave the project in 2018. It will also compete with Google. Bard Technology and Claude chatbot from Anthropic.
Earlier this year, Musk reportedly purchased thousands of powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia, the chips needed to build a large language model.
X.AI is one of several companies owned or operated by Musk. In addition to his control of X, formerly Twitter, which he acquired last year, Musk is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. He also runs the Boring Company, which develops underground tunnels, and the startup Neuralink.
Last month, Musk said X (formerly Twitter) investors would own 25% of X.AI.
“We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to advance our mission,” X.AI said on its website.
People working on X.AI include alumni from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla. According to their LinkedIn biographies, they’ve worked on systems similar to DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots.
According to the documents, Musk founded X.AI in Nevada in March.
Here’s what Musk told analysts during Tesla’s earnings call in July when asked if X.AI could compete with any of Tesla’s businesses:
” There were only some of the world’s stylish masterminds and AI scientists who wanted to join an incipiency, but they did not want to join a big, fairly well-known company like Tesla,” he said. “So I thought, OK, I’d rather run a startup than have them go work somewhere else. It’s kind of the genesis of X.AI.”
As for X.AI’s funding, the initial sale date coincided with Musk’s appearance at the DealBook Summit in 2023, where he told advertisers who had suspended campaigns on X to “go to hell.” Dozens of advertisers stopped spending on X after Musk posted and escalated anti-Semitic comments.
