Elon Musk's xAI Seeks $1 Billion in Private Funding

According to CryptoPotato, Elon Musk's xAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot company, is seeking up to $1 billion in private funding. The principal product offered by xAI is Grok, an AI chatbot with access to tweets from all over the platform and programmed to be as snarky as possible. xAI is Musk's response to OpenAI, which he co-founded but later left due to disagreements with Sam Altman and others over the development and profit from the technology they were building. In early December, Musk filed an SEC Form D for xAI, allowing for the sale of securities without full registration, on the condition that the sale remains private. The document states that up to $1 billion worth of equity in the firm would be sold, with over $134 million already spoken for. Despite the controversial nature of the new AI platform and the somewhat subsiding buzz surrounding AI development, the founders' reputation made it likely that interest in the sale would be high, even if it were closed off to retail investors. According to Bloomberg, xAI is already halfway to meeting its funding target, with confidential sources stating that $500 million had already been committed to the platform. However, Musk has disputed Bloomberg's version of events, calling it 'fake news.' It remains to be seen how much of the story will be proven true once the asset sale is finished. Investors who aided in Musk's takeover of Twitter include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Management, and others. Some private investors in talks with Musk have reportedly requested to buy computing power from xAI in lieu of shares or, in some cases, alongside them.