xAI was founded by Musk[7][8][9] in Nevada[4] on March 9, 2023, and has since been headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.[10]
Igor Babuschkin, formerly associated with Google's DeepMind unit, was recruited by Musk to be Chief Engineer.[11]
Musk officially announced the formation of xAI on July 12, 2023.[12][13] He linked the date (7 + 12 + 23 = 42) to the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams,[14] in which a supercomputer calculates that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42; and to the company's mission "to understand the universe".[15][6]
In December 2023, in a U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, xAI revealed that it had raised US$134.7 million in outside funding out of a total of up to $1 billion.[16][17] Despite the filing, Musk later claimed via X that xAI was not seeking any funding.[18]
In May 2024, Musk predicted that AI will make most jobs obsolete, requiring a high universal income.[22]
In June 2024, The Greater Memphis Chamber announced xAI is planning on building the world's largest supercomputer in Memphis, TN.[23] The supercomputer is planned to be the most advanced AI model when it becomes fully operational in December 2024. Local government in Memphis has voiced concerns regarding the increased usage of electricity, 150 megawatts of power at peak, and while the agreement with the city is being worked out, the company has deployed 14 VoltaGrid gas generators to temporarily enhance the power supply.[24] Environmental advocates claim that the gas-burning turbines emit large quantities of gases causing air pollution, and that xAI has been operating the turbines illegally without the necessary permits.[25][26]
Musk diverted a large number of Nvidia chips which had been ordered by Tesla, Inc. to X and xAI.[27]
Products
While xAI's stated goal is "to understand the true nature of the universe", one of its immediate objectives is to create an AI that is capable of advanced mathematical reasoning, something not found in current models.[28]
On November 4, 2023, xAI unveiled Grok, an AI chatbot that is integrated with X. xAI stated that when the bot is out of beta, it will only be available to X's Premium+ subscribers.[29][30]
On November 6, 2023, xAI released PromptIDE, an integrated development environment designed for prompt engineering and interpretability research, offering tools like a Python code editor and rich analytics to empower users in exploring and refining prompts for large language models like Grok-1.[31][32][33]
On March 2024, Grok was made available to all X Premium subscribers; it was previously available only to Premium+ subscribers.[34][35]
On March 29, 2024, Grok-1.5 was announced, with "improved reasoning capabilities" and a context length of 128,000 tokens.[38]
On April 12, 2024, Grok-1.5 Vision (Grok-1.5V) was announced. Grok-1.5V is able to process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, graphs, screenshots, and photographs.[39][40]
On August 14, 2024, Grok-2 was made available to X Premium subscribers.[41] It is the first Grok model with image generation capabilities.[42]
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