The company was slated to wrap up a roughly US$6 billion financing earlier this month, but the final close still has not happened in the deal, which has been in motion since last year. Most recently, the company sought as much as US$6.5 billion and is aiming to get closer to that target over the next few weeks, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is not public.
Musk did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
The start-up, a rival to ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has been marketed to a range of Silicon Valley investors via a pitch deck that touted Musk’s track record at Tesla and SpaceX, Bloomberg News previously reported.
Elon Musk addresses via videoconference the audience at Viva Technology, Europe’s biggest start-up and tech conference, at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris on May 23, 2024. Photo: Agence France-Presse
The pitch materials also noted that xAI and its chatbot, Grok, will be able to make use of the high-quality data from X, Musk’s social platform previously called Twitter. Having access to data is crucial for building large language models – the technology that powers AI chatbots – an area where xAI aims to compete with other well-funded businesses such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
The deal will give xAI a pre-money valuation of US$18 billion, a metric that does not include dollars raised. The Financial Times previously reported some details of the deal.
On Thursday, Musk spoke in a remote interview at the Viva Technology conference in Paris about xAI’s goal of being “as truth-seeking as possible.”
He criticised other AI models developed by Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI as “pandering” to political correctness. He added that another goal for xAI is to “try to be the funniest AI”.
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