In Just 16 Months, Elon Musk Achieved With xAI What Took OpenAI Nearly Nine Years To Accomplish
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, reportedly reached a valuation of $50 billion just 16 months after its founding in July 2023. It is now worth more than what the billionaire paid for Twitter. Arguably the most well-known name in the AI space, OpenAI, last valued at $157 billion, needed over nine years to achieve the same milestone.
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According to Business Insider, xAI is gaining traction in the competitive AI sector and is now valued higher than other AI startups, such as Anthropic (valued at $19 billion) and Perplexity (at $2.8 billion).
xAI’s journey has been marked by significant milestones, including raising $5 billion in its latest funding round to purchase 100,000 Nvidia chips. These chips will power the Memphis supercomputer, a facility designed to enhance the company’s AI capabilities and support Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology. According to WSJ and other outlets, the funding included $5 billion from Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Qatar Investment Authority.
The Memphis supercomputer, awaiting final approval, is a key part of xAI’s strategy. It was built in less time than is customary for projects of this kind and is situated on a former manufacturing site. In a recent podcast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mentioned that xAI finished building the supercluster in 19 days, although the procedure usually takes more than a year.
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“Just to put in perspective, 100,000 GPUs are easily the fastest supercomputer on the planet as one cluster. A supercomputer that you would build would normally take three years to plan,” Huang said, stressing the role of xAI’s engineering and infrastructure teams and crediting them with the system’s rapid deployment.
xAI has most notably developed the AI chatbot Grok, inspired by the sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Grok is positioned as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. The chatbot uses xAI’s proprietary large language model, Grok-2 and has been a notable part of the company’s portfolio.
