--- title: "Elon Musk’s AI Company Announces Ungodly Sum of Money to Beat OpenAI" description: "xAI, the artificial intelligence startup founded by Elon Musk, has raised billions of dollars in its latest round of funding." date: "2024-05-28" modified: "2024-05-28" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-ai-company-money-openai" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "OpenAI" - "The Industrialists" tags: - "elon musk" - "OpenAI" - "the digest" - "xai" --- # Elon Musk’s AI Company Announces Ungodly Sum of Money to Beat OpenAI ![xAI, the artificial intelligence startup founded by Elon Musk, has garnered billions of dollars in its latest round of funding.]() *\Image: Apu Gomes via Getty / Futurism\* ## War Chest Multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is getting ready to take on the big boys of the industry. On Sunday, the company [announced]() that it had raised a whopping $6 billion during its latest round of funding, putting it in closer competition with bitter rivals OpenAI. In fact, xAI is now the second most valuable AI startup in the world, *The Wall Street Journal* [reported](), with a valuation of $24 billion. But it still has some catching up to do. OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, absolutely blows that sum out of the water with an [over $80 billion valuation]() of its own. That being said, xAI is not even a year old yet. Musk [founded]() the startup in July last year, and to send his pet project into the uppermost echelon of the industry, he's called on his usual litany of investors, many of whom also backed his Twitter (now X) takeover. (Apparently, they [haven't learned their lesson]() yet.) These include the titanic Silicon Valley VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and foreign backers such as Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal at the Kingdom Holdings group. "The funds from the round will be used to take xAI's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies," the company wrote in its announcement. ## Scant Offerings xAI's flagship product is its AI chatbot called Grok, released in November. The [potty-mouthed ChatGPT clone]() was trained on users' posts made on X and is available to paid subscribers. With that limited rollout — [not many are willing to pay for a hollowed-out Twitter]() — Grok hasn't exactly set the world on fire. Mainly, it's gained a reputation for [edgy jokes]() and[ making off-the-wall claims](). Despite that, Musk's ambitions for his AI venture are apparently lofty: he's said that he aims to build a "[maximum truth-seeking AI]() that tries to understand the nature of the universe" — an ethos that is matter-of-factly restated in the company's latest funding announcement. ## Open Season But Musk's ambitions are seemingly also very petty, as there's a lot of bad blood between him and OpenAI. Musk co-founded the company in 2015, but [left three years later]() after heated disputes over its direction. Since then, he's publicly [raged]() about OpenAI's [fishy transition]() from a non-profit to creating a lucrative for-profit arm, and in March [sued the company on those grounds](). He's also warned [about the dangers of AI technology](). But perhaps above all, Musk simply perceives OpenAI and ChatGPT as too "[woke]()." Grok is meant to be the free-speech absolutist's answer to that, but it too [has apparently fallen victim]() to the so-called "woke mind virus." Now flush with enormous amounts of investment, xAI could finally pose a serious challenge to OpenAI's dominance. It's unclear what all those funds will be put towards, but Musk [teased]() on Monday that "there will be more to announce in the coming weeks." **More on AI:** *[Another OpenAI Researcher Quits, Issuing Cryptic Warning]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()