Elon Musk spent the past year building his artificial intelligence startup xAI at breakneck speed. Now he has to turn it into a real business, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Musk started xAI last summer in an effort to play catch-up with OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer he co-founded and left in 2018 after a power struggle. He poached talent from across the industry. He pushed contractors to build a massive new data center in a matter of months, a nearly unheard of timeframe for a project of that size.
Now, he is promising the facility in Memphis, Tenn. will help xAI deliver the world’s most powerful AI “by every metric” by December.
Most of xAI’s revenue has come from Musk’s own web of companies. xAI’s main product – its Grok chatbot – is available only to subscribers of his social network X. The startup is powering customer support features for SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service, people with knowledge of the matter said. It is also expected to help create new AI features for X’s search engine, one of the people said.
The startup has discussed deal with Tesla whereby xAI would get some Tesla revenue in exchange for providing the carmaker with access to its technology and resources.
TechCrunch reported Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is reportedly preparing a release a stand-alone consumer app.
The app will likely arrive after xAI closes its next funding round, which could reach $5 billion and value the company $50 billion, per the Financial Times — double its valuation six months ago. Musk is said to have given investors who backed his $44 billion Twitter acquisition 25% (or access up to 25%) of the shares in xAI to reward their loyalty.
According to the FT, some of Musk’s backers — including Fidelity, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey — could be made whole through shares in xAI thanks to the startup’s massive rise in value.
The Verge reported Elon Musk’s xAI could soon make its next move to compete with OpenAI: launching a standalone app for its Grok chatbot.
Musk created xAI as an alternative to OpenAI, the company he helped found but later distanced himself from over ideological differences. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, xAI is planning to launch an app as soon as December that could go head-to-head with Open AI’s ChatGPT as it races to scale up.
Currently, users can access Grok through X, but only if they subscribe to the service. Citing unnamed sources, the Journal reports that xAI is also behind customer support features for Starlink, part of Musk’s other company, SpaceX. X did not immediately respond to a rust for comment on the report.
In my opinion, it looks like Elon Musk is very interested in making use of xAI right now. I’m not entirely sure what he plans to do with that.