I’ll bet you didn’t know Elon Musk has his own AI company

I’ll bet you didn’t know Elon Musk has his own AI company. With his penchant for the letter X, want to guess what he named it?  

Elon Musk is a busy guy. There’s no debating that this genius isn’t limited by the Earth’s gravity (literally), and there’s little he can’t do. With an IQ of 160, Elon Musk pretty much achieves anything he sets his mind to.

I mean, this guy is running more than 5 companies right now including Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink, and most recently Twitter (which he renamed X). He’s been been a founder over 10 times, including a couple of companies he’s started and sold like Zip2 which he sold for over $300 million in 1999 to Compaq Computer Corporation, or X.com which he merged with another software company called Confinity that would rebrand at PayPal that IPOed in 2002 and was acquired by eBay in 2015. 

And we don’t even have time to talk about how he helped co-found OpenAI, and all the drama that has turned out to be.

So what’s the name of Elon Musk’s new AI company? Well, obviously he named it X.AI (no one ever accused him of being original).

Now X.AI is looking to raise $1 billion dollars in capital. Apparently he’s a little jealous of OpenAI’s success, which as we mentioned earlier he was involved in co-founding before that relationship went to hell (I’m starting to see a trend with business ventures Elon Musk enters into with other people, but I digress).

One thing I find interesting about X.AI is how he’s structured it. Usually when an entrepreneur starts a new company the capitalization table (called a cap table for short) lists the founders of the company as owning 100% of the shares before we start slicing that up to be divided between an employee pool of stock option holds, and future investors in the venture. When X.AI was founded Elon Musk gave the current shareholders in X (formerly known Twitter) a 25% stake in X.AI. 

So why would he do that? Well, he’s mentioned in the press that X.AI’s first product, that they launched in October, is called Grok, which he said is modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Grok is an AI chatbot, that X.AI launched after 2 months of training, and says it has real-time knowledge of the internet. 

Where do you think that “training” and “real-time knowledge of the internet” are coming from? Twitter, I mean X, of course! So that’s why current shareholders of X are receiving a 25% stake in X.AI. Elon Musk needed an extensive dataset he could train his chatbox Grok on, and have the ability for it to have access in real-time to what’s going on in the world and online. 

The average person can’t just start a new AI company? The costs would be measured in the Billions with a capital B. And even if you had access to billions of dollars you need 2 things in order to train an AI model: access to huge amounts of data to train your LLM (Large Language Model) on, and an insane number of high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs). 

X.AI has already raised $134.7 million out of the company’s $1 billion target, so they are definitely on their way to reaching their goal, but what’s all the money for?

Now you can see why Elon Musk’s X.AI gave the investors in X/Twitter 25% of the company for access to X/Twitter’s data, and earlier this year Elon Musk mentioned that he had secured thousands of high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia. The exact kind of chips necessary to build a LLM. Once again Elon Musk must have foreseen where the AI industry was headed, ordered those GPU chips from Nvidia before they became nearly impossible to buy now, and set in motion his plans for X.AI. Genius! 

So now that X.AI has launched it’s chatbox Grok, and trained it on X/Twitter historical and real-time data, it needs to raise funding to continue it’s training with what I imagine to be Elon’s end goal of world domination (this world of planet Earth first, then Mars next I’m sure). 

Elon Musk’s AI startup — X.AI — files to raise $1 billion in fresh capital