The media reports that Elon Musk’s startup xAI, which operates in the sphere of artificial intelligence, is close to raising funds for $6 billion from investors.

According to preliminary information released by journalists on Friday, April 26, the value of the mentioned company in the financing round will reach $18 billion. It is worth noting that these are preliminary data that have not yet been commented on at the official level.

Silicon Valley venture capital company Sequoia Capital has committed to investing in Elon Musk’s startup. The relevant information was published by various sources in the media, which increases the likelihood of its reliability.

Journalists also report that Elon Musk has approached other investors with an offer to join the mentioned financing round, some of whom in 2022 participated in the process of acquiring by the billionaire social network Twitter, which was eventually renamed X.

Mr. Musk announced the launch of xAI in July last year. A few months earlier, he had clearly hinted at his intention to develop an artificial intelligence-based chatbot that would become a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is worth noting that Elon Musk took part in the establishment of OpenAI, but left the board of directors of this company in 2018. The billionaire has repeatedly spoken negatively about the activities of the ChatGPT developer. In March, it became known that Elon Musk had sued OpenAI. He reproaches the company for the fact that in the process of its development, the primary goal became a commercial result, and not a benefit for all mankind, which was designated as the main guideline of work, as provided by the founding agreement on AI. In this context, the billionaire also noted that as part of the official positioning, the firm continues to declare its commitment to the materialization of the original mission, but in fact, business is currently the main priority. Moreover, Elon Musk claims that OpenAI has de facto become a subsidiary of Microsoft.

Last year’s xAI presentation took place on Twitter Spaces. At that time, Elon Musk said that the startup would be in direct competition with such large companies as OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, and firms at an early stage of existence, among which, for example, Anthropic. At the same time, the billionaire noted that xAI will use a different approach to developing its foundation model of artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk believes that artificial general intelligence based on brute force will not lead to success. According to him, xAI is not trying to solve AGI on a laptop, and there will be heavy computing. The billionaire also said that his startup’s team will have the freedom to explore ideas other than simply expanding the data parameters of the foundation model of artificial intelligence.

Last November, xAI presented a digital product called Grok. This development is a model of artificial intelligence. The startup’s website notes that Grok is designed to generate answers with a bit of wit. It was also stated that this model of artificial intelligence has an element of rebellious worldview in its virtual consciousness, which is why those who hate humor should not interact with it.

Moreover, the startup claims that Grok has real-time knowledge of the world. In this context, the importance of interaction with X for the existence of the mentioned characteristic is noted. The startup separately explains that its artificial intelligence model answers the questions of users who ignore many other similar digital products.

In March, xAI presented an open-source AI configuration. At that time, Elon Musk stated that Grok-1 is a model with 314 billion parameters.