Despite no one's belief, the tech tycoon Musk still "firmly believes" that he is an alien.

Musk thinks that in the Milky Way, humans may be a solitary existence. He emphasizes that human consciousness is fragile.

Looking back at Musk's rich entrepreneurial history, this tech enthusiast is trying to make the fragile human consciousness shine, to pursue the vast universe and the sea of stars.

To this end, he has founded several companies, whose vision is long-term and grand, dazzling people. Among them, Tesla (TLSA.US) aims to help humans achieve sustainable development on Earth; SpaceX's long-term goal is to make humans a multi-planetary species and achieve a sustainable multi-planetary civilization.

Advertisement

The mission of Musk's less than one-year-old xAI company is even more shocking to netizens, and its development speed is also astonishing.

The valuation has inflated to hundreds of billions within a year.

Data shows that xAI was established in July last year, mainly committed to developing real, efficient and advanced artificial intelligence systems that can bring the greatest benefits to all mankind. The company's mission is to understand the true nature of the universe and explore the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

Compared with the missions of some domestic and foreign AI large model companies such as "generative AI entering thousands of industries" and "seeking the optimal solution for converting energy into intelligence", xAI's mission is so profound and grand, pointing directly to the distant future of mankind.

Some well-known investment institutions are very interested in Musk's xAI and have thrown an olive branch to xAI, and this is a huge olive branch.Recently, xAI announced the completion of a Series B financing round worth up to $6 billion (equivalent to approximately 43.5 billion RMB). The main investors in this round of financing include American venture capital firm Valor Equity Partners, Dubai-based investment company Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital (Sequoia Capital), Fidelity Management & Research Company, and others.

According to insiders, including the latest cash injection, this round of financing may value xAI at over $24 billion (equivalent to approximately 173.9 billion RMB), making xAI a unicorn enterprise in the AI industry overnight.

It is worth mentioning that the single financing scale of xAI this time is close to half of the nearly ten-year financing amount of the progenitor of artificial intelligence large models - OpenAI (about $14.3 billion), and its fundraising ability is by no means weak. Data shows that OpenAI, which has been established for more than 8 years, is currently valued at about $80 billion.

The rapid expansion of xAI's valuation can be regarded as an epic event in the global AI industry, and it also makes Musk one of the few wealthy investors in the world who can compete with OpenAI, Google, or Meta in the field of AI.

xAI stated, "This round of financing will be used to bring xAI's first batch of products to the market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the development of future technologies." The news of xAI's $6 billion financing may attract more capital to invest in the AI field, accelerating the development and innovation of the industry.

AI track "little giant"

There is an old Chinese saying that money can make the devil push the mill. Musk, who has grand dreams and a firm will, may use xAI's abundant cash to launch ambitious research and development plans, not only challenging old rivals like OpenAI and Google in the AI field, but also causing a wave of turmoil in the field of artificial intelligence, leading the development of human artificial intelligence.

In fact, from its establishment to the present, xAI has been running wildly.

The team of xAI is not simple, and the team members are composed of top talents from well-known institutions such as OpenAI, DeepMind, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. They have participated in important projects such as AlphaCode, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.

The addition of these AI "top students" is an important foundation for xAI to become the "new wave" in the AI industry.In November of its founding year, xAI released its first AI large model product—Grok. Grok is capable of understanding the world in real-time and answering questions that other AI systems cannot handle.

In March of this year, xAI published the weights and architecture of the 3140 billion-parameter Mixture of Experts model Grok-1, opening the door for various applications, optimizations, and expansions of the model.

Last month, xAI announced the improved Grok-1.5 model with long-context capabilities, and then the Grok-1.5V with image understanding capabilities, marking a rapid enhancement of xAI's model capabilities.

To comprehend the nature of the universe, xAI has put in significant effort. The company introduced a new benchmark called RealWorldQA, designed to assess multimodal models' fundamental understanding of the real-world space. The company claims that in the coming months, it expects to significantly improve multimodal understanding and generation capabilities across various modalities such as images, audio, and video, as an important step towards building an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that can understand the universe.

To enhance computational power, Musk proposed the "supercomputer" plan. Recently, Musk informed investors that he plans to build a supercomputer named "Computron," to support the development of xAI. He hopes that this supercomputer will be connected with 100,000 NVIDIA chips and is expected to be operational in the fall of 2025.

In summary, xAI's fundraising of 6 billion USD has also become the largest single financing in the global AI market. From the perspectives of xAI's future technological innovation, industry competition, and social impact, xAI is poised to leave a significant mark on the global artificial intelligence industry, exerting a profound influence on the AI sector.

SpaceX is about to conduct its fourth flight test, and the dream of multi-planetary human life may be one step closer. As a strong newcomer in the AI industry, will xAI be able to uncover the mysteries of the universe with an exploratory spirit, aiding humanity in becoming a highly advanced technological species in the cosmos?