Artificial intelligence startup xAI’s billionaire owner’s ambitions to take on ChatGPT creator OpenAI and other companies like Anthropic and Google got a big boost by virtue of raising of $6 billion in most recent funding round. Announcement in this regard was made on Sunday.

KEY FACTS

• In a blog post, xAI named Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Management & Research Company,Sequoia Capital, Saudi entrepreneur Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and others as the investors who took part in the Series B funding.
• In an X post, Musk claimed xAI’s “pre-money valuation” was $18 billion.
• Musk stated there will be “more to announce in the coming weeks,” with the blog post adding that the enterprise will be bringing “multiple exciting technology updates and products soon.”
• Funds raised in this round will be utilized to “take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” the startup informed.

This funding round saw the participation of Vy Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Valor Equity Partners, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others apart from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, xAI said in the post. The AI race has been heating up lately, with quite a few investors signing big checks for start-ups looking to compete with market leaders like OpenAI. Though xAI did not disclose what it was valued at post the latest round of funding, other media reports hitherto suggested the company would be valued at between $18 billion and $24 billion.

Musk issued a hiring call for AI developers, inviting them to join his establishment if they “believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.”

BACKDROP

After making accusation thatOpenAI’sChatGPTis politically correct, biased and “woke,” Musk foundedxAI in April last year. Ironically, Musk was a co-founder and early backer of OpenAI, but his rapport with the company has soured in recent years, climaxing in Musk filing a lawsuit against OpenAI. In the suit, Musk alleged the ChatGPT creator diluted its foundational goal of developing an open-source AGI to “benefit humanity” in favor of maximizing profits. The billionaire has even attacked OpenAI’s main rival Google, saying the issues with its Gemini AI tool is rootedin the company being a “woke bureaucratic blob.” In November, xAIpresented its chatbot called ‘Grok’, which is only available to X users who pay for a premium subscription.