The Race is Heating Up, Elon Musk's AI Startup xAI Raises $6 Billion

[Nomad76]

Elon Musk's AI company xAI just scored big (according to Reuters), raising a massive $6 billion in new funding. This sky-high investment values xAI at a whopping $24 billion as investors go all-in on challengers to top AI players like OpenAI. Big-name funders like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia backed the funding round, according to xAI's blog post on Sunday. Before this, xAI was valued at $18 billion, Musk said on social app X.

The huge cash influx will help xAI launch its first products, build advanced tech, and turbocharge their research, the company stated. "More news coming soon," Musk teased cryptically after the funding announcement. It's an AI investment frenzy as tech giants like Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet pour fortunes into leading the red-hot generative AI race. With its new war chest, xAI is gearing up to make some serious waves.



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[ExcuseMeWtf]

Love him or hate him, he knows how to grift.

 

[Onasi]

Wasn’t he the one who said that AI is his biggest fear and an existential threat to humanity? I mean, I guess 20 bucks is 20 bucks.

 

[mb194dc]

Wondering how long it'll take for the bubble to burst? Now Musk is jumping on the bandwagon, probably not too long?

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web

The head of Google sat down with Decoder to talk about some of the biggest issues facing AI and the internet.

www.theverge.com

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information

Making Stuff Up You know how Google's new feature AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this). Well, according to a new interview at The Verge...

uk.news.yahoo.com

 

[evernessince]

Wasn’t he the one who said that AI is his biggest fear and an existential threat to humanity? I mean, I guess 20 bucks is 20 bucks.

I don't believe that statement and investing in AI are mutually exclusive. Then again I also don't think Musk really cares so long as he's making money.

 

[dont whant to set it"']

The lowest of the lows for TPU articles, shame, shame!
$6B? cooked books by wallstreet like they did before increasing the market cap?

 

[Onasi]

I don't believe that statement and investing in AI are mutually exclusive. Then again I also don't think Musk really cares so long as he's making money.

That’s a fair point. I suppose nobody who is investing in, say, Raytheon would publicly say anything other than “war is bad”.

 

[bonehead123]

Wasn’t he the one who said that AI is his biggest fear and an existential threat to humanity? I mean, I guess 20 bucks is 20 bucks.

IMO, the Muskovite himself is the biggest threat to humanity, with his ever-increasing & unadulterated greed mongering, slack you-jack you attitude and relentless quest to control everything & everybody with his shit-quality but way overpriced crap....

Wondering how long it'll take for the bubble to burst? Now Musk is jumping on the bandwagon, probably not too long?

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web

The head of Google sat down with Decoder to talk about some of the biggest issues facing AI and the internet.

www.theverge.com

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information

Making Stuff Up You know how Google's new feature AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this). Well, according to a new interview at The Verge...

uk.news.yahoo.com

If it don't bust on it's own, due to market forces, the musky boi will just whip out his knives and slash & hash all the bubbles himself

 

[JWNoctis]

More money that may well end up lining the pockets of the shovel merchants (i.e. NVIDIA) amid all the gravy boat stuff. It's the whole tulip/railway/dot-com mania all over, but it's...fun to watch in a morbid sense, while it lasts. This whole stuff has already disrupted the life of many.

Though none of those, previous, bubbles would have been the end of the world as we know it - ask your neighborhood hobbyist artist or professional translator for that - and might well just be the end of the world, for all that many people more knowledgeable than me would foresee.

Musk in AI is probably not gonna help with the latter.

 

[64K]

Millions of starry eyed investors dream of the massive profits to be made and a lot will it looks like and even more will lose too. That's the way investments work. You have to know when to get in and when to get out. Most (including myself) don't know when to run for the exits so I leave things like this to the experts.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I for once don't have a negative view of Musk, and I think xAI will do very well (especially if they take the same approach they did with Grok), but OpenAI will win the race because they're the oldest and best known name.

As worthless as many of us consider AI to be, it's probably the biggest thing to ever happen to Big Data as a whole.

 

[thesmokingman]

Lol at all the trolls coming out.

 

[SOAREVERSOR]

More money that may well end up lining the pockets of the shovel merchants (i.e. NVIDIA) amid all the gravy boat stuff. It's the whole tulip/railway/dot-com mania all over, but it's...fun to watch in a morbid sense, while it lasts. This whole stuff has already disrupted the life of many.

Though none of those, previous, bubbles would have been the end of the world as we know it - ask your neighborhood hobbyist artist or professional translator for that - and might well just be the end of the world, for all that many people more knowledgeable than me would foresee.

Musk in AI is probably not gonna help with the latter.

No it's not a mania. The AI revolution more akin to the industrial revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution, and most like the automation revolution.

Also your examples don't add up. Tulips and dot-comm were driven by average people. You know, morons. The railroad on the other hand was driven by industry and governments. You know, not moronic consumers (consumers are the biggest idiots out there). Which is why the railroads actually did what they claimed to do and changed humanity forever. Because it wasn't driven by idiot consumers. AI is driven by governments and industry and they are not idiots.

I get the feeling the hostility to AI is it requires GPUs that consumers can't afford but that's life. The future PC gaming is renting it as a service from the cloud anyways. There's no way around that either.

Things change news at 11 with dog bites man.

 

[Why_Me]

Lol at all the trolls coming out.

They've been programmed to hate on everything Elon Musk after he freed Twitter.

 

[kondamin]

No it's not a mania. The AI revolution more akin to the industrial revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution, and most like the automation revolution.

Also your examples don't add up. Tulips and dot-comm were driven by average people. You know, morons. The railroad on the other hand was driven by industry and governments. You know, not moronic consumers (consumers are the biggest idiots out there). Which is why the railroads actually did what they claimed to do and changed humanity forever. Because it wasn't driven by idiot consumers. AI is driven by governments and industry and they are not idiots.

I get the feeling the hostility to AI is it requires GPUs that consumers can't afford but that's life. The future PC gaming is renting it as a service from the cloud anyways. There's no way around that either.

Things change news at 11 with dog bites man.

The global financial crisis was caused by banks, because they wanted more and more faster.
the same is happening here with the ai bubble. Businesses are run by people and it doesn’t make any difference if they are consuming or selling they want to believe their own and others bullshit If it sounds good.

this doesn’t mean ai is worthless this just means that just like the internet it will grow over the years to become ever more important but just like the dot com bubble investors are expecting to much to soon.
and that’s going to bite them in the ass As it’s going to go POP.

nvidia already stooped so low to saying it’s lowering prices for their crippled hardware in China because of competition from huawei…
nvidias backlog is shrinking and it’s very likely quite some of that hardware is now mining some form of crypto just not to sit idle in data centers of companies that over ordered

and then we have intel and amd who missed the bus and are now pushing tiny npus on consumer grade hardware just so that someone would adopt their trash as to enable them to get some of nvidias ai pie

if you are a researcher/ developer great you have a bright future there, if you are an investor diversify your portfolio away from tech

 

[JWNoctis]

No it's not a mania. The AI revolution more akin to the industrial revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution, and most like the automation revolution.

Also your examples don't add up. Tulips and dot-comm were driven by average people. You know, morons. The railroad on the other hand was driven by industry and governments. You know, not moronic consumers (consumers are the biggest idiots out there). Which is why the railroads actually did what they claimed to do and changed humanity forever. Because it wasn't driven by idiot consumers. AI is driven by governments and industry and they are not idiots.

I get the feeling the hostility to AI is it requires GPUs that consumers can't afford but that's life. The future PC gaming is renting it as a service from the cloud anyways. There's no way around that either.

Things change news at 11 with dog bites man.

I'd say that life goes far beyond GPUs made unaffordable, when it is actual careers being derailed and and livelihoods being disrupted, as we speak.

It's true that it is a revolution - No previous revolution had a significantly greater-than-zero chance of being the end of humanity, though.

I do admit that tulips aren't quite comparable here, but plenty of "average people" bought railway stocks for fraction of their values - not unlike borrowing money to invest - and went broke when the companies called in the balance, when the bubble collapsed. It did also disrupt the livelihoods of postillions and canalmen, but did not result in the end of human civilization, despite early fears of agricultural collapse from all that smog and racket.

As to the dot-com bubble, this whole thing is arguably blown out of the bits of the suds left by it.

They've been programmed to hate on everything Elon Musk after he freed Twitter.

Still, the guy had a more...colourful track record than a hundred Sam Altman, if not more than the rest of the major players added up together.

 

[ty_ger]

They've been programmed to hate on everything Elon Musk after he freed Twitter.

I hated his lies long before it became cool to hate him for "freeing" twitter. He's dumb and full of himself; and for some reason, some group of people can't see how dumb he is or keep track of his lies.

 

[Prima.Vera]

I get the feeling the hostility to AI is it requires GPUs that consumers can't afford but that's life. The future PC gaming is renting it as a service from the cloud anyways. There's no way around that either.

Sadly, this is the most true statement. I would not pay a dime for this kind of service, but I can see this is undoubtedly the future. However, that would mean the death of PC gaming as we know it, also the death of PC, if everything would be Cloud based. Even your OS....

 

[JWNoctis]

Sadly, this is the most true statement. I would not pay a dime for this kind of service, but I can see this is undoubtedly the future. However, that would mean the death of PC gaming as we know it, also the death of PC, if everything would be Cloud based. Even your OS....

And come full circle to the old terminal and thin client days? Not if there's demand otherwise, unless it's made illegal for some (or no) reason, and even then there would be an underground scene with all the existing hardware out there, considering how previous prohibitions of those kinds usually ended up.

Still waiting to hear which big-name game would have it first to be a streaming exclusive.

Back to topic, it is true that AI services that truly mattered will almost certainly be cloud-based, since it's becoming apparent that, unlike early-mid 00's TOP10 supercomputer capability in a current desktop workstation, that kind of hardware capability would never scale it into consumer hardware in the foreseeable future, and models of truly powerful and dangerous capability would be too risky to be released for local use.

 

[Vayra86]

I hated his lies long before it became cool to hate him for "freeing" twitter. He's dumb and full of himself; and for some reason, some group of people can't see how dumb he is or keep track of his lies.

There's so much wrong here
The logo says Xi... and the AI model is fed by Twitter/X feeds, so what it spits out will likely align with China/Russia propaganda quite nicely too.

And damn is the man losing weight fast and that skin color ain't improving either. Ketamine sure does work wonders, doesn't it, or is he on Ozempic too... I guess he's trying to become an equal match in weight class so he can step in the ring with Mark Zuckerberg soon.
I really do wonder where this might end. Fun to watch. Its like the personification of everything that's wrong with hypercapitalism and what it does to people.

Sadly, this is the most true statement. I would not pay a dime for this kind of service, but I can see this is undoubtedly the future. However, that would mean the death of PC gaming as we know it, also the death of PC, if everything would be Cloud based. Even your OS....

Ah, the death of PC gaming, there it is again

Its like whack-a-mole isn't it. Meanwhile:

The Latest PC Gaming Statistics (2024)

The latest data and statistics related to PC gaming, including the number of gamers, market revenue, and comparisons to other platforms.

explodingtopics.com

Everything go up. BUT:
The prediction is that we've already plateau'd, and lo and behold, surprise surprise, GAMING can absorb yet another way to play games and still exist as it always has. The key to this market is diversification. In content, in ways to play, in having all the options on offer. That's the PC's strength, always has been, and this will never change. Force the cloud on people, and you will see an opposite effect just as well.

We just want our cake, eat it, save it, and then eat it again, while ending the day owning cake We're ready to re-purchase the same game several times if they remaster it or re-release it on the PC after being a console exclusive. We're ready to own multiple consoles AND a PC to game the games we want to game. Heck, why not try a few cloud services now that they're cheap as well? Cheap games! Oh hey, EGS got added to the landscape, free games!

NONE of this points to a market in decline or undergoing radical change. It points to a pie that keeps growing. Online revenue has doubled several times over, but we're still playing offline content too.

And yes, its just online, because the hardware keeps getting bought despite price increases

Everything cloud ain't happening.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Yes, the exact statement they were saying about Gaming on physical media. Like nobody would want just the digital copy.... Guess what? In less than 10 years you are exclusively buying games using digital shops, especially for PC. Long are gone the days where you could buy the game CD/DVD in a nice box, with manual, booklet, stickers, maybe soundtrack and some figurines if you were lucky. Now everything is digital, for x3 times the price....