X.AI, an artificial intelligence startup founded by Elon Musk, has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering. The company has already secured nearly $135 million from four investors, with the first sale occurring on Nov. 29.
X.AI is one of many companies owned or led by Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, operates underground tunnel developer Boring Company and brain-tech startup Neuralink.
X.AI aims to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website, and has released a chatbot called Grok, which the company says is modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
The chatbot has real-time knowledge of the internet and is designed to answer questions with wit and humor. X.AI seeks to compete with companies including OpenAI and Google’s Bard technology and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.
The company is staffed by alumni of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla. They’ve worked on projects including DeepMind’s AlphaCode and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chatbots, according to LinkedIn profiles.
X.AI’s financing coincided with Musk’s appearance at the 2023 DealBook Summit, where he told advertisers who had suspended campaigns on X to “go f*** yourself.” Dozens of advertisers had stopped spending on X after Musk posted and amplified antisemitic comments.
Last month, Musk said investors in X would own 25% of X.AI. “We are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission,” X.AI says on its website.
Earlier this year, Musk reportedly secured thousands of high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia, the kind of chips necessary to build a large language model.
