In an attempt to take on competitor OpenAI, Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and his investment firm Kingdom Holding have contributed $6 billion to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI.
The company announced on Monday that the funding round, which also included contributions from Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Valor Equity Partners, and Vy Capital, will aid in the introduction of xAI’s products to the market.
“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,” it said.
“Several exciting technology updates and products” will be unveiled soon, it continued.
The owner of X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk, stated in a post on the platform that the company was valued at $18 billion before the funding round.
Together with Prince Alwaleed, Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding already has a sizeable investment in X.
As per the company’s website, Kingdom Holding and its chairman jointly accounted for a significant shareholding of X in October 2015, following an initial purchase of shares in 2011.
In July of last year, Mr. Musk introduced xAI in response to the increasing need for generative AI in order to rival the industry leader OpenAI, which has received funding of roughly $13 billion from Microsoft.
November saw the release of its Grok-1 generative AI platform, and March saw the release of the upgraded Grok-1.5.
Grok-1.5’s performance, according to benchmarks provided by xAI, is nearly on par with the top large language models in generative AI, such as Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s GPT.
The company is marketing Grok as a “conversational AI for understanding the universe,” which is consistent with Elon Musk’s declared goal of using xAI “to understand reality” and “the true nature of the universe” in July 2015.
Mr. Musk doubled down on his attack against ChatGPT creator OpenAI when he announced at the time of Grok-1’s release that xAI would make Grok open source.
In a lawsuit filed in February, Mr. Musk accused OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of abandoning the company’s original non-profit goal and referred to it as “a lie.”
OpenAI quickly responded, claiming that Mr. Musk was only sorry that he wasn’t involved in the business’s current success.
