Musk’s AI Startup Behind Grok to Get $18 Billion Valuation. Will It Leapfrog OpenAI?

According to a Thursday report by Bloomberg, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) venture xAI is on the cusp of reaching a valuation of $18 billion after its latest funding round.

In late April, the business outlet reported that the AI startup was nearing a deal to secure $6 billion in funding from such big-name participants as Menlo Park-headquartered venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

Musk launched the xAI venture back in July 2023 in order to compete with the likes of OpenAI, which managed to gain a lot of prominence because of its viral ChatGPT chatbot.

The startup launched its own generative AI chatbot called Grok in December for paying subscribers on the X social media network (formerly Twitter).

In March, xAI announced the launch of Grok-1.5, an enhanced version of Musk’s AI chatbot. The improved version is supposed to be better at coding as well as mathematical tasks.

Even with the latest funding, it will be highly challenging for OpenAI to leapfrog OpenAI. The latter is now valued at a whopping $80 billion following a recent deal.

Other AI startups are also seeing significant funding. For instance, search startup Perplexity is now valued at $1 billion after securing a $63 million funding round spearheaded by investor Daniel Gross. Earlier this week, AI startup Atlan reached a valuation of $750 million after raising $105 million. Meanwhile, British self-driving startup Wayve has secured $1 billion in funding from the likes of Japan’s Softbank. Mistral and Aleph Alpha were also among the startups that recently secured massive funding rounds.

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