Source: Zhidongzhi

Financing 12 billion US dollars in less than 7 months, what level?

This is the latest battle report from xAI, a large AI model company founded by Musk.

Zhixixi reported on December 24 that today, xAI announced that it had completed a US$6 billion (approximately RMB 43.8 billion) Series C financing, with investors including A16Z, Blackrock, etc. Strategic investors Nvidia and AMD are also involved and continue to support xAI’s rapid expansion of infrastructure.

xAI disclosed that this round of financing will be used to further accelerate its advanced infrastructure, launch breakthrough products that will be used by billions of people, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies, To fulfill the company's mission of understanding the true nature of the universe.

Coupled with the US$6 billion Series B financing announced in May this year, this new funding brings xAI’s total financing to US$12 billion (approximately RMB 87.6 billion). This means that xAI’s valuation exceeds the previously rumored US$50 billion, which is equivalent to JD.com’s total market value of US$52.6 billion. In terms of valuation, xAI has firmly occupied the "second position" among the world's large model unicorns, second only to OpenAI.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported in November this year that xAI told investors that it had raised US$5 billion in a round of financing, achieving US$50 billion (approximately RMB 364.9 billion), which is more than double its valuation six months ago (USD 24 billion).

According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, investors donated at least $77,593 (a total of 97 people participated, but the documents did not reveal their identities).

The Financial Times reported that only investors who supported xAI in the previous round of financing were allowed to participate in this round of financing. Investors who finance Musk's acquisition of Twitter can receive up to 25% of xAI's shares.

It is reported that xAI has informed investors that it plans to raise more funds next year.

Grok 3, xAI’s most powerful model to date, is being trained.

xAI is currently focused on launching innovative new consumer and enterprise products that will leverage Grok, Colossus and social platforms to change the way people live, work and play.

01.Expanding the world’s largest AI supercomputer to 200,000 GPUs

Mux founded xAI in July last year. Shortly after, the company released Grok, its flagship generative AI model. The model currently powers many features on the social platform, including chatbots available to Premium subscribers and free users in select regions.

According to xAI’s disclosure, since May this year, xAI has made significant technological progress and launched a number of key initiatives:

Colossus, xAI relies on globalDecisive hardware advantage is established with the largest AI supercomputer, which uses NVIDIA's full-stack reference design and is equipped with 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. Colossus became fully operational in 122 days, compared to typical multi-year industry time frames, and started running workloads just 19 days after the first servers were delivered. Soon, xAI will double the scale of Colossus to a total of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs using the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform.

Grok 2, xAI’s cutting-edge language model with the most advanced reasoning capabilities.

xAI API, which enables developers to programmatically access its underlying models and is built on a new custom technology stack, allowing multi-region inference deployment for global low-latency access.

Aurora, a proprietary autoregressive image generation model developed by xAI for Grok, enhances multi-modal understanding, editing and generation capabilities.

Grok on , which uses the platform to understand what's happening in the world in real time, has recently added new features to enhance the experience, such as web search, citations, and image generator Aurora.

Musk said the Memphis data center has the most powerful AI cluster in the world. xAI is training next-generation Grok models in its Memphis data center.

According to TechCrunch, the data center is currently powered in part by portable diesel generators. In November of this year, xAI received approval from the Memphis Area Power Authority to provide an additional 150MW of power, enough to power approximately 100,000 homes.

To win the agency’s support, xAI promised to improve the quality of the city’s drinking water and provide Tesla-made batteries to the Memphis grid at a discount. But some residents criticized the move, saying it would put pressure on the power grid and worsen air quality in the area.

Tesla is also expected to use the upgraded data center to improve its self-driving technology.

From an operational perspective, xAI has grown rapidly in the year since its establishment, from a dozen employees in March 2023 to more than 100 today. In October of this year, xAI moved into OpenAI’s old corporate offices in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood.

02. Go all out to catch up with AI competitors, with revenue of approximately US$100 million this year

Musk is particularly focused on defeating OpenAI.

He is one of the founders of OpenAI. He left OpenAI in 2018 due to differences in the company's development direction. He argued in previous lawsuits that OpenAI profited from his early involvement but broke its nonprofit promise to make its AI research accessible to everyone. OpenAI responded that the accusations were baseless.

According to the Wall Street Journal, xAI has alreadyeX's Starlink internet service provides customer support capabilities, and the startup is said to be in talks with Tesla to provide research and development services in exchange for a portion of Tesla's revenue.

Tesla shareholders oppose these plans. Some have filed lawsuits against Musk over his decision to start xAI, saying he diverted talent and resources away from Tesla and into what was essentially a rival business.

These deals, along with xAI’s developer and consumer-facing products, have pushed xAI’s annual revenue to about $100 million. By comparison, Anthropic is reportedly on track to generate $1 billion in revenue this year, while OpenAI aims to hit $4 billion by the end of 2024.

According to TechCrunch, Grok has what Musk described as a "rebellious character" - willing to answer "tough questions that most other AI systems refuse to answer." For example, when told to be vulgar, Grok will happily comply with the user's request, saying some swear words and vulgar terms that cannot be heard on ChatGPT.

Grok itself is unwilling to cross certain boundaries and avoid issues. However, Musk has ridiculed ChatGPT and other AI systems for being too "sober" and "correct." He also called Grok a "maximum pursuit of truth" and less biased than competing models.

In the past year, Grok has gradually integrated into?. At the time of release, Grok was only available to users, and developers had to be skilled enough to get the "open source" version up and running.

After integrating the image generator Flux, Grok can generate images on ? (controversially, without guardrails), can also analyze images, and summarize news and trending events (but not perfectly).

Reports suggest that Grok may handle more functionality in the future, from enhanced search capabilities and account profiles to help with post analysis and reply settings.

xAI is trying its best to catch up with competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to stand out in the generative AI competition. The company launched an API in October that allows customers to build Grok into third-party apps, platforms and services, and has just launched a standalone Grok iOS app to test users.

Musk insists this is not a fair fight.

In a lawsuit filed against OpenAI and its close partner Microsoft, Musk's lawyers accused OpenAI of "actively trying to eliminate competitors such as xAI by forcing investors to commit not to fund it." Musk's lawyers said OpenAI also unfairly benefited from Microsoft's infrastructure and expertise and it was a "de facto merger."

Musk often says that XAI’s data gives xAI an edge over its competitors. Last month, ? made privacy changes that would allow third parties, including xAI, to post on ?Train the model.

According to the vision outlined by xAI, its models will be trained on data from various Musk-owned companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, and its models can then improve the technologies of these companies.

03.Conclusion: The global AI competition is intensively financing.

xAI is not the only large AI model company that has raised huge amounts of funds.

Anthropic, a large American model unicorn, recently received US$4 billion in financing from Amazon, bringing its total financing to US$13.7 billion and a valuation of more than US$18 billion (approximately RMB 131.4 billion).

The even bigger super unicorn is OpenAI, which announced in October this year that it had received US$6.6 billion in financing, bringing its total financing to US$17.9 billion and its post-investment valuation to US$157 billion (approximately 1,145.9 billion yuan). In November this year, OpenAI was revealed to have received a US$1.5 billion (approximately RMB 10.9 billion) investment from Japan’s SoftBank Group.

PitchBook data shows that large transactions such as OpenAI and Anthropic have driven AI venture capital activity to more than 2,000 transactions in the third quarter of 2024, totaling US$31.1 billion.

In the past month, Large model companies also released intensive financing news: on December 11, Beijing large model startup Face Wall Intelligence announced that it had recently completed hundreds of millions of yuan in financing; on December 17, Beijing large model unicorn Zhipu announced that it had recently completed 3 billion yuan in financing; On December 18, Beijing-based AI video generation startup Aishi Technology announced the completion of nearly 300 million yuan in financing; on December 23, Shanghai’s large model unicorn Step Star was revealed to have completed hundreds of millions of dollars in Series B financing.

2024 is coming to an end, but with the help of the hot financing wave, the competition for large models in the new year seems to be more intense.