Recently, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI completed a new round of huge financing, amounting to US$6 billion, increasing the company's total financing to US$12 billion.This round of financing has significantly increased xAI's valuation, which is expected to reach US$50 billion.

It is understood that xAI's main investors include Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z, a well-known venture capital firm), Blackrock (the world's largest asset management company), Fidelity (Fidelity Investment, a leading global investment management company) and other heavyweight capital.In addition, two giants in the GPU industry, Nvidia and AMD, also participated in this round of investment, which is a gathering of stars.

Moreover, among these investors, only investors who have supported xAI in the previous round of financing can participate in this round of financing.According to reports, investors who once provided funds for Musk's acquisition of Twitter can enjoy privileges in this financing-up to a 25% stake in xAI.

xAI's flagship product is the Grok AI model, which is known for its unique "rebellious" characteristics and is able to answer sensitive questions that other AI systems typically avoid.The Grok AI model has now been integrated into multiple functions of social platform X (formerly Twitter), including chatbots, image generation and analysis.In the future, Grok is expected to further expand its application scope to support functions such as search optimization and post analysis.Although Grok's capabilities continue to expand, its less content review and openness have sparked widespread discussion in the market.

Musk has ridiculed ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems for being too "sober" and "politically correct," although Grok himself is reluctant to cross certain boundaries and engage in overly heated discussions on political topics.He also called Grok "maximizing the pursuit of truth" and being less biased than other competitive models.Thanks to integration with the open image generator Flux, Grok can generate images on X (no guardrails, controversial).The model can also analyze images and summarize news and trend events (but is not perfect).

Analysts said that Grok may handle more X functions in the future, from enhancing X's search functions and account profiles to helping with post analysis and reply settings.

Currently, xAI is accelerating deep data integration with Musk's companies such as Tesla and SpaceX to improve product competitiveness.However, the strategy has also sparked dissatisfaction and legal action from Tesla shareholders, who accuse Musk of diverting resources to "rival" companies.Despite the controversy, xAI's annual revenue has reached about $100 million, while its competitors Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to have revenue of $850 million and $4 billion respectively.There is still a lot of gap between xAI's income and theirs.

Musk asserted that competition with Anthropic and OpenAI will not be a fair fight.However, the biggest advantage of xAI is that it has the extensive corpus provided by X and can be used to build powerful large language models.Last month, X changed its privacy policy to allow third parties, including xAI, to train large language models on X's posts.

In terms of data center construction, xAI's supercomputer center in Memphis is partially powered by diesel generators, and plans to upgrade its server farm next year and increase the number of GPUs.At the same time, xAI promises to improve drinking water quality in cities and offers discounted Tesla made batteries in exchange for additional power supply.This shows that xAI is actively fulfilling its environmental responsibilities while pursuing technological development.

In the one year since its establishment, xAI has expanded quite rapidly from an operational perspective, with the number of employees increasing from a dozen in March 2023 to more than 100 now.In October, the startup moved into OpenAI's old corporate offices in the Mission community in San Francisco.According to reports, xAI has told investors it plans to raise more capital next year.