Elon Musk's competitor OpenAI, called xAI, has agreed to raise $6 billion with a preliminary estimate of $18 billion. This is reported by TechCrunch, citing informed sources.
According to them, investors will receive a quarter of the company's shares. The deal is scheduled to close in the next few weeks, unless its terms change.
However, they have already been reviewed once. Last week, Musk's representatives told potential investors about plans to raise $3 billion with a preliminary estimate of $15 billion. But due to the large number of people willing to participate in the funding round, these figures were quickly adjusted.
"We all received an email with new terms: \"$6 billion for $ 18 billion, and do not complain, as many others want to enter into the deal\", - the interlocutor told TechCrunch.
Sequoia Capital, Future Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Gigafund will participate in the investment round. The founders of the last three are part of Musk's inner circle.
Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures is a longtime friend of the billionaire. Luke Nosek of Gigafund was one of the first investors in SpaceX, and Valor founder Antonio Gracias invested in Tesla in the early stages of the company's development.
According to the source, due to the method of obtaining obligations, it is not entirely clear which of the other investors is involved in the transaction.
"It's a Zoom call, and it's just you, Elon and Jared [on the other side] at a table with a few engineers," he added.
Musk will collect data for xAI from his companies
xAI's marketing materials state that the company's goal is to connect the digital and physical worlds. To do this, Musk plans to collect training data from all of his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company and Neuralink.
One of the sources is also the social network X, which has already integrated the Grok chatbot from xAI into a paid subscription. However, this is only the beginning of a large-scale virtual cycle that should help the AI model master the physical world, Musk said.
X acts as a platform for Grok. And the chatbot, in turn, will receive data from Musk's other companies to improve its capabilities for interacting with the physical world. This can be useful, for example, to create fully self-driving Tesla cars.
Another beneficiary of xAI may be the humanoid robot Tesla Optimus. The billionaire expects to use it in his factories this year.
But for now, the immediate benefit will be X itself, which has noticeably depreciated in a year and a half since the acquisition by Musk. Nevertheless, the company already has a stake in xAI, so the social network will be able to benefit from the AI startup.
xAI is a direct competitor to OpenAI
Musk does not hide the fact that xAI should compete directly with OpenAI. Last year, it became the fastest growing company in history thanks to the launch of the chatbot ChatGPT.
Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015, but resigned from the board of directors in 2018 due to disagreements over its commercialization. Since then, he has been criticizing the startup and its director Sam Altman, ironically suggesting that the company be renamed ClosedAI.
In February, Musk sued OpenAI. In his opinion, the startup ceased to be open after the release of an AI product with closed source code, and he also accused Altman of violating the co-founding agreement.
Another step towards confrontation with OpenAI was the release of the Grok-1 source code. This allowed everyone to familiarize themselves with the basis of the chatbot and experiment with it.Recall that in April, xAI introduced the first multimodal version of Grok-1.5V.