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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

#31

Post by ETH_start »

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?

This is a peculiar company mission so not sure why you find it odd to make the official one of xAI.

The all-encompassing nature of it seems befitting a company producing increasingly general-purpose AI.

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

#32

Post by talldayo »

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…

I mean, he can try. The world already has a number of AI corporations headed up by totalitarian megalomaniacs though, the market may eventually reward some other course of action.

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

#35

Post by nomilk »

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.

Something surprising Sam Altman mentioned on the Lex Fridman podcast was that it only takes about 6 months to get a top physicist up to speed and productive researching AI.

So the team could largely be newbies to AI (with extremely good fundamental knowledge/skill), rather than folks we've all heard of from the AI scene.

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

#38

Post by kristopolous »

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.

At some point it's no longer a product and a company as much as a financial instrument.

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

#39

Post by belter »

silvester23 wrote: post #20
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.

There is at least one person there at the top of the Technical Team....I don't recognize from the scene, at least his name does not show as author or co-author in any ML papers I can remember reading...a certain Elon Musk.... :-)
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