Reports have revealed Elon Musk is looking to raise $1 billion (R18 billion) in funding for his AI company, xAI.
According to an SEC filing, the man behind Tesla, SpaceX and X has already raised about $135 million so far from four unnamed investors, with the first sale occurring on the 29th of November. This means that he is still looking at about $865 million to go to meet his $1 billion goal.
At the current moment, xAI is working on Grok, which is Musk’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard or Anthropic’s Claude. According to its website, Grok will have a “rebellious streak” and will answer “spicy” questions that other AI bots don’t engage with. The product has only been in development for two months, but will supposedly be released in beta soon to X Premium+ subscribers.
Initially, Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, but stepped down from the board in 2018; lately, Musk has been critical of OpenAI, especially as it fired, then re-hired, CEO Sam Altman in November.
