Elon Musk's xAI raises 6bn in bid to take on OpenAI

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has closed a 6bn ( 4.7bn) investment round that will make it among the best-funded challengers to OpenAI. The startup is only a year old, but it has rapidly built its own large language model (LLM), the technology underpinning many of the recent advances in generative artificial intelligence capable of creating human-like text, pictures, video, and voices. The funding round, one of the biggest yet in the burgeoning AI field, values the company at 18bn before taking into account the 6bn investment, Musk said on X, the social network he owns. Generative AI has so far proven very expensive to develop, in part because of the need for huge amounts of computing power and energy to train LLMs. In a blogpost, xAI said: "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."