Did they raise 6B or at 6B valuation?
Raised 6B, with something like a 18-24B valuation[1] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-23/musk-s-xa...
The market truly is irrational. :D
xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
61–70 of 285 posts
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Does Sam Altman have any relevant technical experience to make that assessment? Sounds like something someone would say that just lost their key technical team members.
For whatever it's worth, Scott Aaronson went from incisive skeptic to drooling fanboy in just about that long. Sam, likewise, seems prone to mistaking loyalty for expertise at this point in his career.
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#63He is the richest man in the world and he doesn’t have 6B in the pocket to finance it on his own?
Why risk your own money, when you can risk the money of others, and reap the rewards?
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#64> 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.
Sure it does. The problem is that they're not producing any general-purpose AI.
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#65He is the richest man in the world and he doesn’t have 6B in the pocket to finance it on his own?
A rich man doesn't get rich by risking their own money. They risk the money of their investors
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#66I wish he’d just focus on SpaceX or Tesla (the cars, not the robot).
Part of xAI is to be leverage against Tesla not giving him more control.
He’s been actively pushing for more control of Tesla for exactly this https://electrek.co/2024/05/20/elon-musk-confirms-threat-giv...
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#67Unitree 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.
Did GP ninja edit their comment? I don’t see that quote
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ther…
I still fondly remember the story an OpenAI rep told about fine-tuning with company slack history. Given a question like "Can you do this and that please." the system answered (after being fine-tuned with said history) "Sure, I'll do it tomorrow." Teaches you to carefully select your training data.
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ther…
The datasets should not be used for knowledge but to train a language model.
Using it for knowledge is bonkers.
Why not buy some educational textbook company and use 99.9% correct data? Oh and use RAG while you are at it so you can point to the origin of the information.
The real evolution still has to come though, we need to build a reasoning engine (Q*?) which will just use RAG for knowledge and language models to convert its thought into human language
Re: xAI announces series B funding round of $6B
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ther…
The datasets should not be used for knowledge but to train a language model. Using it for knowledge is bonkers. Why not buy some educational textbook company and use 99.9% correct data? Oh and use RAG while you are at it so you can point to the origin of the information. The real evolution still has to come though, we need to build a reasoning engine (Q*?) which will just use RAG for knowledge and language models to…
How does one differentiate knowledge from the language model in an LLM? At least in a way that would provide a benefit?