Elon Musk's xAI emerges as serious OpenAI rival with $6 billion funding round, supercomputer plans

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midian182

midian182

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What just happened? xAI is shaping up to be a serious rival to market leader OpenAI after Elon Musk's startup said it would raise $6 billion in its Series B funding round. xAI was only announced less than one year ago and released its chatbot, Grok, last November.

xAI wrote that investors in its Series B fundraising include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The company says the money will be used to take its first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies.

Six billion dollars is no small amount of money, but it's par for the course in the lucrative AI industry. Anthropic has raised over $6 billion, while Microsoft invested a massive $13 billion into OpenAI.

When Musk announced xAI last year, the sixth company under his control, he said it had the goal of understanding the "true nature of the universe."

xAI launched its first and so far only product, Grok, in November. Musk said the chatbot is modeled on the excellent UK book/radio/TV series (and the less successful Hollywood adaptation) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which means it likes humor, sarcasm, and sassiness, apparently.

After introducing the latest 1.5 version of Grok earlier this year, it was recently reported that a supercomputer powered by 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs – around five times the number used in the current model – is being built to power the next version of Grok, at a cost of billions of dollars. Musk, who is calling the machine the "gigafactory of compute," added that it will be "at least four times the size of the biggest GPU clusters that exist today."

The Series B funding announcement states that xAI is primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity. Before Grok, Musk talked about creating a "maximum truth-seeking AI" that he called "TruthGPT."

Musk has long been critical of OpenAI, calling it "effectively controlled by Microsoft." He was one of the co-founders, backers, and initial board members of the ChatGPT maker, departing the company in 2018 over what he said was a conflict of interest with Tesla. The billionaire sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman earlier this year over claims they breached their original contractual agreements by putting profit ahead of developing AI that benefits humanity. OpenAI responded by publishing some of Musk's old emails.

Musk repeated xAI's request for more people to join the company, adding that its mission requires "maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness."

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Elon Musk's xAI emerges as serious OpenAI rival with $6 billion funding round, supercomputer plans

 
Well if anybody had any hopes for the legitimacy of AI as a serious tool of the future that would replace every job and supercharge us into the era of transhumanism there you go: If Elon is buying, AI might as well have been kissed by the angel of Death at this point, no clearer way to know it's a scam if he is in on it big time (money-wise).
 
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It's funny how you keep hearing about AI, and it's another chatbot.

I mean, yeah it's nice to get an answer to a question in a clean, digested, conversational style (and I'm sure it's cool to be able to get plug and play code) but where is the *one big thing* that every revolutionary product drops and changes humanity?
 
The novelty will be that xAI's chatbot will be an insufferable edgelord that inserts itself into all conversations and responds exclusively in what other LLMs call hallucinations 😒
 
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"xAI is primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity."

I love how Musk keeps trying to convince the masses that everything he does is for the benefit of humanity and not simply lining his own pockets. Truthful and competent, yeah, that's synonymous with Musk and everything he does. *rolleyes*

GodisanAtheist said:
It's funny how you keep hearing about AI, and it's another chatbot.
Click to expand...
It's just another FOMO rush. All these companies building chatbots saw that OpenAI was successful and there's money to be made, so they're rushing to compete. The problem is that once we have 10+ different chatbots out there they will realize there isn't as much money to be made anymore once you have to split the profits between 10+ different companies. They're investing heavily in this nonsense now, but I predict that in a couple of years once the novelty wears off the house of cards will start to collapse and some of these companies go out of business or at the very least will have massive layoffs and start scaling back their spending big time.
 
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Elon sees an opportunity to invest his money (which he will never use in his life time) to help the rest of us, b4 evil people take ovr and make Ai that is not in the hands of "We the People"...

It is Amazing how many people hate Elon for Grok, OPEN Ai and xAi... all bcz they think with their feelings and are unable to deal with truth.

Seems peeps are still salty Elon canceled their multi-accounts on Twitter..
 
Dimitriid said:
: If Elon is buying, AI might as well have been kissed by the angel of Death at this point, no clearer way to know it's a scam
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Because online payments (Paypal), Electric Cars (Tesla), private space launches (SpaceX) and global satellite Internet (SpaceX: Starlink) are all scams, right?

Better put another hamster in that wheel ... the thought processes aren't running yet.
 
Remember when the elon butt kissers were here a few months ago when Elon was calling for a halt to all AI development for the good of humanity. A few of us could see right through him as its very easy to do and called it out that he just wanted competition paused while he built his own AI since he was behind.

Here we are, right again about how he is nothing but a liar.
 
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lonetac said:
Remember when the elon butt kissers were here a few months ago when Elon was calling for a halt to all AI development...Here we are, right again about how he is nothing but a liar.
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When you invent false facts, you reach false conclusions. Musk didn't "call for a halt to AI development". He was one of 1000+ technology leaders who, more than one year ago, called for a six-month pause on AI research to allow more time to develop safety protocols for its use.

We'll await your apology for misrepresenting Musk's position.
 
"maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness."

This fills me with so much confidence!!!
/sarcasm off.
 
Endymio said:
When you invent false facts, you reach false conclusions. Musk didn't "call for a halt to AI development". He was one of 1000+ technology leaders who, more than one year ago, called for a six-month pause on AI research to allow more time to develop safety protocols for its use.

We'll await your apology for misrepresenting Musk's position.
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No apology needed. I was here and read the comments. Nice try as usual to be completely factually and objectively incorrect and proving yet again you have nothing of value to bring to a conversation other than blah blah blah.

Toodles!
 
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lonetac said:
Nice try as usual to be completely factually and objectively incorrect
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You posted a falsehood, and, even once corrected, refuse to correct it. That's a rather black mark on your character.

Even worse than claiming a six-month pause was a "total" permanent halt is misrepresenting it to include any and all research. The open letter specifically referred to one -- and only one -- specific type of AI research. From the letter itself:

"...This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities...."
futureoflife.org

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter - Future of Life Institute

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
futureoflife.org futureoflife.org
 
Endymio said:
You posted a falsehood, and, even once corrected, refuse to correct it. That's a rather black mark on your character.

Even worse than claiming a six-month pause was a "total" permanent halt is misrepresenting it to include any and all research. The open letter specifically referred to one -- and only one -- specific type of AI research. From the letter itself:

"...This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities...."
futureoflife.org

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter - Future of Life Institute

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
futureoflife.org futureoflife.org
Click to expand...
Ooops, I didnt post a falsehood. I never said he said he wanted it paused indefinately. Learn to read. You made that part up so you could strawman against me, I see through your tactics way to easily.

Whats a black mark on your character is you make assumptions about people to try and paint them in a bad light. It seems you have some issues with that are absolutely being toxic in your attacks against my character.

It is and is now even more obvious his only reason was to use it to catch up, not for the good of humanity.

Try coming back to reality.
 
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lonetac said:
Ooops, I didnt post a falsehood. I never said he said he wanted it paused indefinately.
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You called Musk a liar, because he called for a six month pause more than a year ago -- a period of time that, by the time Musk's "new rival" begins training AI models, will have long since expired.

Musk didn't lie. You did.

t is and is now even more obvious his only reason was to use it to catch up
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Musk was merely one of 1000+ people -- many others of which are involved in AI research -- who also called for the same pause. They're all "liars" attempting to bring down the competition?
 
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