Elon Musk wants to raise $1 billion in equity for his AI business

Billionaire wants xAI to stay up with competitors like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is attempting to keep up with competitors like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google in the battle to dominate the artificial intelligence space by raising $1 billion (£0.8 billion) for his business, xAI.

According to a statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company is looking for a total of $1 billion in equity financing, having already secured $135 million (£107 million) from investors.

Following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November of last year, the competition to create generative AI products—that is, systems that produce believable text, image, and voice from basic prompts—has heated up as the largest businesses in Silicon Valley vie for supremacy.

Microsoft said in January that it was strengthening its cooperation with OpenAI, supported by a $10 billion investment, following the remarkable impact of that chatbot.

Three years after joining OpenAI as a co-founder in 2015, Musk—the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and the owner of the X platform, formerly known as Twitter—left the company. Musk established xAI in July, and the business unveiled Grok, a chatbot with a “rebellious streak,” as its first AI model, last month.

X Premium subscribers who meet specific requirements will get access to Grok. Musk stated last month that platform investors would hold a quarter of xAI. The entrepreneur has cautioned that artificial intelligence (AI) may pose “one of the biggest threats to humanity,” though.

Announcing in September that it will spend up to $4 billion in the firm Anthropic, which has developed its own generative AI chatbot named Claude, Amazon has also entered the AI fray.

Anthropic is among OpenAI’s primary rivals in the young but rapidly expanding field of artificial intelligence. Anthropic claimed it would train its models on Google hardware and utilize its cloud services after Google invested $300 million in the company last year.

Another competitor, Inflection AI, a year-old company based in Silicon Valley, raised $1.3 billion in funding in June with the help of Microsoft and Nvidia.