Elon's $6B supercomputer funding round
Elon Musk's xAI raises $6B, Supercomputer plan & Musk predicts AGI 'next year', Synapse Collapse hits 10M, Trump to pardon Silk Road's Ross Ullbricht + more
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∆ Tech in the News
Fintech Collapse - VC-backed banking-as-a-service startup Synapse is liquidating under Chapter 7, severely impacting 10 Million customers and other fintech startups like Copper, Juno and Mainvest.
Silk Road Pardon - Donald Trump pledged to commute Silk Road creator, Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence on Day 1 of his new term.
‘Project Greymatter’ - Apple will focus on “Practical AI Tools” for core apps like Safari, Photos, and Notes at June’s WWDC.
Manual Overview - Google continues to manually remove AI Overviews that offer misinformation on specific searches as they emerge.
Nuclear AI - Sam Altman-backed nuclear startup Oklo signed a contract to supply 100MW to power Hyperscale Wyoming’s AI data center.
The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week
xAI’s $6B AGI Supercomputer Mission
Elon Musk let slip on Twitter that he predicts Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be reached by ‘next year’ in response to a post from Google’s Logan Kilpatrick. He also just raised one of the biggest AI funding rounds ever, with $6B for xAI, and announced plans for a new AI supercomputer. Does he know something we don’t? Sure, Musk has a history of failing to meet Tesla delivery deadlines, but it seems xAI is going all-in on reaching AGI before rivals OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind.
$24 Billion Valuation!
xAI just announced it has raised a $6B Series B funding round from Sequoia, Valor, Lightspeed, and Andreessen Horowitz, at a huge pre-money valuation of $18B. Still, compared to OpenAI’s $86B valuation, there is a lot of upside room for xAI. xAI is led by former DeepMind, Microsoft, and Tesla Execs, and will use the funds to bring initial products like Grok 2.0 to market, build advanced AI infrastructure, and accelerate R&D.
‘Gigafactory of Compute’
To further this infrastructure mission, Musk also announced plans for a massive xAI ‘Gigafactory of Compute’ supercomputer with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. This would be at least 4x larger than the biggest AI clusters currently, supercharging the compute power of its products like the Grok 2.0 chatbot currently in training. Musk aims to have the supercomputer operational by Fall 2025. Oracle is seen as a potential partner with news the companies are negotiating a $10B multi-year cloud server lease deal.
xAI’s ’Work Optional’ OpenSource Vision
xAI’s vision to "connect the digital and physical worlds" and integrate with Musk's other companies hints at the scale Musk is working on. Integrating Tesla’s Robotaxi and Optimus home robots, the X ‘Everything App’ with banking, calling, social media, betting, Neuralink, SpaceX and more, xAI could easily become the most utilised AI company globally. Musk also said last week that the rise of AI will make all jobs ‘optional’, with the combination of AI and robots providing ‘any goods and services you want’.
And for the Musk naysayers, xAI is far more “open” and transparent than OpenAI or even Meta. xAI released an open-source version of Grok earlier this year. On Sunday, Musk doubled down on this OS mission in a Q&A, with a huge commitment to always releasing an AI model that beats the best open source model for the benefit of the AI community.
“Probably none of us will have a job, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want… I do think there’s perhaps still a role for humans in this – in that we may give AI meaning…”
— Elon Musk, xAI Founder, CEO
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