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xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

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Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#11

Post by threeseed »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #3
chambo622 wrote: post #2

What is the bull case here? They close the gap to Anthropic and become a 4th place player?

Unique data set. And Elon. And with Elon, comes a great set of talent. From https://x.ai/about > Our team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Collectively our team contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as…

But we know from Google that unless you can definitively solve the "is this sentence real or a joke" datasets like Twitter, Reddit etc are going to be more trouble than they are worth.

And Elon's recent polarising nature and the callous nature with which he disbanded the Tesla Supercharger team means that truly talented people aren't going to be as attracted to him as in his early days. They are only going to be there for the money.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#14

Post by YetAnotherNick »

dagmx wrote: post #5

Are there any notable people associated with this other than Elon? I’m curious what they’re bringing to the table to be able to fetch that valuation.

It's literally the first sentence in the link

> Our Series B funding round of $6 billion with participation from key investors including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#15

Post by nomilk »

stealthcat wrote: post #10

Unitree is better than Optimus. Qwen et al is better than Grok. BYD is better than Tesla.

> Comma.ai is better than Tesla FSD

I don't know about the other comparisons mentioned, but Hotz himself said comma is/has always been about 2 years behind Tesla.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#16

Post by danieleggert »

lionkor wrote: post #6

> The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe. I yawned so hard my jaw unlocked. Can't wait to see groundbreaking... checks notes ... "advancements in various applications, optimizations, and extensions of the model". Do these companies only hire yes men?

Yes

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#17

Post by saghm »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #14
dagmx wrote: post #5

Are there any notable people associated with this other than Elon? I’m curious what they’re bringing to the table to be able to fetch that valuation.

It's literally the first sentence in the link > Our Series B funding round of $6 billion with participation from key investors including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, amongst others.

Those are the people investing, right? The parent comment sounds like it's asking who is _getting_ the money.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#19

Post by infotainment »

chambo622 wrote: post #12
floppiplopp wrote: post #9

Anything Musk is now too many inferior products and broken promises for any sensible investor. Might as well just burn the money.

Yet the money keeps coming, so I want to learn what I'm missing.

It’s not just Musk — as soon as you hit a certain level, it basically becomes impossible to fail. I’ve noticed that even if a senior leader is ousted from a company in disgrace, another company will invariably pick that person up fairly quickly.

Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B

#20

Post by silvester23 »

dagmx wrote: post #5

Are there any notable people associated with this other than Elon? I’m curious what they’re bringing to the table to be able to fetch that valuation.

There used to be a list of people on the about page but they changed it, apparently. Here's a snapshot that still shows it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240415120557/x.ai/about

I don't know enough about the AI/ML scene to say if any of these are notable people.

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