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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

#191

Post by Jensson »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #182
qeternity wrote: post #173

Quite a few comments here in disbelief and hating on Musk. For all the criticism of Elon, he has been foundational in Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX and OpenAI. Even if you think Tesla is troubled/overvalued, he has built multiple enormous companies, and one of a handful of people to have built a company into a $1T valuation (however fleeting). So yes, the arithmetic for VCs is very straightforward: for better or for worse…

Foundational at Paypal and OpenAI? I've heard different. Also leaving out Twitter which has at least halved (if not more) it's valuation. I would say he's batting less than .500, so while still good, not a sure thing in the slightest and the trajectory seems to be on the down.

He was for OpenAI at least, he recruited key members and convinced them to go get big funding which they did seek from Microsoft instead of Elon himself. Likely OpenAI wouldn't have gotten anywhere without his involvement, they did break off from him since he wanted too much control not because he didn't help them.

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

#192

Post by smileybarry »

dagmx wrote: post #140
klunger wrote: post #120

> xAI will continue on this steep trajectory of progress over the coming months, with multiple exciting technology updates and products soon to be announced. There is a lot of potential for using AI in drug discovery and development, biotech more broadly and chemistry/material science. Pharma is investing heavily in this right now. If useful, the output here could potentially also support Neuralink and even SpaceX. C…

The “true nature of the universe” bit is that Elon believes that competing LLMs are too neutered because they disallow certain terms etc. (his words are much more politically charged and I do not agree with his take on this and many other things) Therefore he believes that Grok can be an LLM trained on the voices of the people using his alleged free speech platform:X.

For context, it should be noted that his platform disallows certain terms too, but sometimes worse (in a way).

For example: saying “cis” or “cisgender” flags your post as abusive and limits visibility. Saying the 6-letter (or 3-letter) f-slur does not.

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

#193

Post by naveen99 »

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?

To play devil’s advocate, he lists “truthful” as a goal, which is emphatically missing from openai, google, microsoft, facebook. Google even removed don’t be evil. Elon is greedy and truthful (although obviously with plenty of self deceipt when conflict of interest…). But how far can you really go with truth, when no one wants the truth: not the west, not the east, and not the Middle East. And your allies and investors are in it for the greed part, but not the truth part so much. Trump tried the same thing with truth social… problem is all the greed and shadiness loses credibility with truth also.

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

#195

Post by tarsinge »

breck wrote: post #172
keyle wrote: post #92

What could have they possibly shown to the investors to get that kind of cash thrown at them? Asking for a friend... Did x.ai just become worth more than x.com? We must be nearing the bubble popping...

> What could have they possibly shown to the investors to get that kind of cash thrown at them? Their founder has a track record of making his investors a lot of money while solving really hard, important problems. Current valuations: - Tesla $570B - SpaceX $180B - Neuralink $5B - Boring $5.6B

The capacity of continuing the real world problem solving is very blurry. Boring is a joke. For Tesla he is not a founder, and they are mostly relying on a 10 year old product (new product is a joke) that'll only maybe saved with tariffs. It's mostly a meme stock company by now. SpaceX is a great success but his job was only providing money through government contracts and having the luck of finding Gwynne Shotwell, seems hard to replicate consistently. Add an ongoing mental breakdown and full on lies (FSD, humans on Mars, Hyperloop, ...) and it doesn't look that good (AI is a bit complex, hard to imagine someone in his state still having the intellectual capacity to really handle this). But yeah a new meme stock can still be a good bet for investors.

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

#196

Post by Peer_Rich »

ravetcofx wrote: post #82
lars_francke wrote: post #48

X.ai used to be a service similar to calendly. I still mourn its shutdown and, seeing this, had hoped that it is resurrected :(

I've been using the free version of cal.com which has been phenomenal, and there's self hostable option which is nice

♥ thanks man! we're putting a lot of love into our product and happy to help anyone looking to move away from the old x.ai scheduling

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

#197

Post by Aeolun »

How is it that some people get 6B to understand the true nature of the universe? It’s not like they have a track record of doing anything other than absolutely devastating a previously successful company…

If I ask someone to give me 6B to understand the true nature of the universe they’d laugh in my face, but I sort of assume I’d have an even chance of doing better.

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

#199

Post by naveen99 »

rullopat wrote: post #57

He is the richest man in the world and he doesn’t have 6B in the pocket to finance it on his own?

The ones doing it on their own, are probably doing it privately. One of the reasons for us government asking to know, so atleast they are not kept in the dark.
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