California-based xAI, a company developing AI to accelerate human scientific discovery, announced on Sunday, May 26, that it has raised $6B (approximately €5.5B) in a Series B funding round.
Prominent investors participated in the funding round, including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding.
The company will use the funds to bring its initial products to market, establish advanced infrastructure, and expedite the research and development of future technologies.
The past year has been marked by significant achievements for xAI.
The company was founded in July 2023. This was followed by the release of Grok-1 in November, and more recently, the unveiling of the enhanced Grok-1.5 model featuring long context capability.
Additionally, the Grok-1.5V was introduced with image understanding. xAI’s model capabilities have progressed rapidly.
Notably, the open-source release of Grok-1 has opened up opportunities for advancements in various applications, optimisations, and extensions of the model.
Looking ahead, xAI is set to maintain its upward trajectory with multiple forthcoming technology updates and product launches.
xAI: Building AI to accelerate human scientific discovery
Led by Elon Musk, xAI is primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity.
The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.
The xAI team has made significant contributions to the field, including the creation of widely used methods such as the Adam optimiser, Batch Normalisation, Layer Normalisation, and the identification of adversarial examples.
Additionally, the team has introduced innovative techniques and analyses, such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, μTransfer, and SimCLR.
The team led notable breakthroughs include AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.
The company receives guidance from Dan Hendrycks, the current director of the Center for AI Safety. Moreover, xAI collaborates closely with X Corp to bring its technology to more than 500 million users of the X app.
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