Elon Musk's xAI scores $6B in its series B funding round
- Reference: 1716899406
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/05/28/elon_musks_xai_scores_a/
- Source link:
Musk [1]posted on X that "pre-money valuation was $18 billion."
xAI has been on quite the journey since the company was announced in July 2023. Grok-1 turned up in November, and the model that resides behind the chatbot has since been [2]released as open source .
[3]
Grok-1.5V, the company's first attempt at a multimodal model that can process visual information as well as text, was announced last month. We noted at the time that critics say it has relatively lackluster performance in benchmarks compared to its rivals, although it is early days.
[4]
[5]
As for the funding, the [6]figures might seem eye-popping , but the AI world is awash with cash at the moment, prompting all too many vendors to slap the special letters on all manner of products. Tim Hockin, a Google veteran and one of the minds behind the Kubernetes container orchestration tech, told The Register [7]in 2023 "There's no magic, there's no pixie dust you can sprinkle on something and say 'now with AI!'"
And yet the cash has continued to roll in. Microsoft is said to have spent upwards of $10 billion so far on OpenAI, for example, and financial [8]analysts have been showering it with buy ratings as investors sent its stock price soaring. However, Meta was [9]punished by an immediate stock plunge after Mark Zuckerberg's admission that it might take time before AI technology begins paying back the huge investments being made in the services.
[10]
So, should companies such as OpenAI be worried about the threat from xAI? Probably not. Although Grok benefits from real-time access to the contents of the X.com platform, Simon Baxter of TechMarketView observed: "The chatbot is also playful, humorous and sarcastic, which has made it a somewhat controversial choice, certainly not one you would build your business around, unlike GPT.
"In my view, it will take a Herculean effort for xAI to even catch up to OpenAI, and even then, I'm not sure the approach taken with Grok will appeal to the majority of organizations."
[11]Elon Musk says he doesn’t want 100% tariff on China-made electric vehicles
[12]NYC Comptroller and hedge funds urge Tesla shareholders to deny Musk $50B windfall
[13]FDA gives Neuralink 'a second shot' at human brain chip
[14]Texan construction workers put a rocket up Team SpaceX over 'unpaid bills'
The generative AI marketplace is evolving at speed, and the competition is intense. OpenAI's latest multimodal model, [15]ChatGPT-4o , was released earlier in May, and reportedly responds to audio input far better than previous models.
Musk has grand plans for Grok and xAI, and according to [16]reports , he plans to build a supercomputer capable of handling the workloads of the next version of Grok.
Baxter said, "It seems that plenty of heavy hitters agree with his vision, though I would personally have invested my $6 billion elsewhere." ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1794975702812426595
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/18/grok_chatbot_code_released/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZlX-pCCb46g3C5QIpmD2pQAAAMg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZlX-pCCb46g3C5QIpmD2pQAAAMg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZlX-pCCb46g3C5QIpmD2pQAAAMg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://x.ai/blog/series-b
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/13/kubernetes_tim_hockin_on_ai/
[8] https://www.investors.com/news/technology/microsoft-stock-msft-top-ai-winner-software/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/25/facebooks_value_plummets_as_zuckerberg/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZlX-pCCb46g3C5QIpmD2pQAAAMg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/24/elon_musk_china_tariffs/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/21/letter_penned_by_nyc_comptroller/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/20/neuralink_brain_fda/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/14/spacex_liens_texas/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/13/openai_gpt4o/
[16] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musk-plans-xai-supercomputer-dubbed-gigafactory-of-compute
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Talk about
Fools and their money. That is all I can think of saying.
I'd like to know
what is the use of pitching for, and acquiring, $6 billion in funding for a $24 billion-valued company, if you're actually trying [desperately] to give $56 billion in pay to the CEO (that, being Musk)?
You, Tesla, are trying to give Musk as pay double the value of one of his *entire* sub-companies. So WHY bother pitching apparently gullible investors for funds Elon? Just get funding to give the money directly to YOURSELF and stop the pretending - because that's what you are doing, robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Re: I'd like to know
robbing Peter to pay Paul.
and likely in a way that minimises Paul's tax liability
You got there before me but never mind...
$6 bn here, $6 bn there... pretty soon they'll have attracted the investment they need to cover the $56 bn Elon expects- sorry, deserves - to run the company. (*)
Apparently he's been offered an extra $10 bn on top of that not to run it.
(Ba-dum-tschhh).
(*) In between his main job of running Twitter into the ground, pandering to Nazis and posting edgelord crap like a pathetic, attention-seeking, insecure adolescent wannabe despite being a middle-aged man now comfortably into his fifties.
is this Elon Musk's backup plan to develop AI?
In case the Tesla shareholders decide not to award him the $56B he wants?
Simon says ..
“ In my view, it will take a Herculean effort for xAI to even catch up to OpenAI, and even then, I'm not sure the approach taken with Grok will appeal to the majority of organizations. ”
Given how Musk has advanced the space industry I wouldn't be so doubtful.
[1]List of achievements by SpaceX :
28 September 2008: First privately funded fully liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit ..
12 April 2024: A single Falcon 9 booster reused for the 20th time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
Re: Simon says ..
The difference being that a reusable Rocket was something people had wanted/proposed/talked about for a long time. Because there is a VERY clear path on how that would save massive costs in rocket launches by reusing the most expensive part of a rocket - the engine. Reusing that engine cuts your launch costs almost in half, so it's a clear goal to aim for...
An AI that can be sarcastic is going to be profitable, how? Companies want professionalism in their call centre support, not jokes. So a standard AI which just gives information will be the preference. And do you really see individual people PAYING for a chatbot? I certainly dont... So I guess it will need to be ad supported, and I can totally see how that will go down with a chatbot that will be able to make jokes about the very companies that are advertising with it. Also with Musky's relationship with Advertisers on twitter, I'm sure they will be clamouring to be a part of it... Anyway, show me where you see the magic line to Money with this?
Actually you can say the same with all of the AI firms, but at least those that are focusing on copany usages MAY have a path to profitability in their. The rest are simply being Underpants Gnomes...
Step 1 - Collect underpants.
Step 2 - ???
Step 3 - Profit!!!!
Re: Simon says ..
Given how Musk has advanced the space industry I wouldn't be so doubtful.
SpaceX is only part of his empire. Look at X/Twitter for another example and you can see a business being run into the ground. The difference between the two seems to be that SpaceX has less hands-on/day-to-day input from Musk, whereas he seems to be much closer to X (to the point where it looks like his actions are actively contributing to its decline.
Tesla? Take away the cult of personality and the adulation of sheeple customers....the product really isn't leaps and bounds ahead of a number of other EVs (other than in the number of safety-critical product recalls), and Musk has a track record of making promises that the company and technology can't keep.
Grok benefits from real-time access to the contents of the X.com platform
Oh great, here comes Artificial Incel-igence .
One small problem....
"...Grok benefits from real-time access to the contents of the X.com platform..."
Now, what makes up the majority of Twitters content these days? Bot traffic worded by Chat GPT and other LLM AI platforms.
As I understand it, feeding LLM output to an LLM input leads to, well, enshittification.
xAI is likely going to be useless before it becomes "useful", for the wildly varying intepretations of 'useful' when it comes to this particular tulip bubble.
Steven R