xAI was founded by Musk[9][10][11] in Nevada[6] on March 9, 2023, and has since been headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.[12] Igor Babuschkin, formerly associated with Google's DeepMind unit, was recruited by Musk to be Chief Engineer.[13]
In December 2023, in a U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, xAI revealed that it had raised US$134.7 million in outside funding out of a total of up to $1 billion.[18][19] Despite the filing, Musk later claimed via X that xAI was not seeking any funding.[20]
In May 2024, Musk predicted that AI will make most jobs obsolete, requiring a high universal basic income.[24]
In June 2024, the Greater Memphis Chamber announced xAI was planning on building Colossus, the world's largest supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee.[25] After a 122-day construction, the supercomputer went fully operational in December 2024. Local government in Memphis has voiced concerns regarding the increased usage of electricity, 150 megawatts of power at peak, and while the agreement with the city is being worked out, the company has deployed 14 VoltaGrid portable natural gas powered generators to temporarily enhance the power supply.[26] Environmental advocates claim that the gas-burning turbines emit large quantities of gases causing air pollution, and that xAI has been operating the turbines illegally without the necessary permits.[27][28]
As of August2024[update], Musk was diverting a large number of Nvidia chips that had been ordered by Tesla, Inc. to X and xAI.[29]
On December 23, 2024, xAI raised an additional $6 billion in a funding round supported by Fidelity, BlackRock, Sequoia Capital, among others, making its total funding over $12 billion.[30]
On February 10, 2025, xAI and other investors made an offer to acquire OpenAI for $97.4 billion.[31]
On March 28, 2025, Elon Musk announced that xAI acquired sister company X Corp., the developer of X platform, which was previously acquired by Musk in October 2022. The deal, an all-stock transaction, valued X at $33 billion, with a full valuation of $45 billion when factoring in $12 billion in debt. Meanwhile, xAI itself was valued at $80 billion. Both companies were placed under a single entity called X.AI Holdings Corp.[33][34]
Products
While xAI's stated goal is "to understand the true nature of the universe", one of its immediate objectives is to create an AI that is capable of advanced mathematical reasoning, something not found in current models as of 2023.[35]
On November 4, 2023, xAI unveiled Grok, an AI chatbot that is integrated with X. xAI stated that when the bot is out of beta, it will only be available to X's Premium+ subscribers.[36][37]
On November 6, 2023, xAI released PromptIDE, an integrated development environment (IDE) designed for prompt engineering and interpretability research, offering tools like a Python code editor and rich analytics to empower users in exploring and refining prompts for large language models like Grok-1.[38][39][40]
In March 2024, Grok was made available to all X Premium subscribers; it was previously available only to Premium+ subscribers.[41][42]
On March 29, 2024, Grok-1.5 was announced, with "improved reasoning capabilities" and a context length of 128,000 tokens.[45]
On April 12, 2024, Grok-1.5 Vision (Grok-1.5V) was announced. Grok-1.5V is able to process a wide variety of visual information, including documents, diagrams, graphs, screenshots, and photographs.[46][47]
On August 14, 2024, Grok-2 was made available to X Premium subscribers.[48] It is the first Grok model with image generation capabilities.[49]
On February 17, 2025, xAI released Grok-3. Users can tap "Think" to enable Grok-3 Reasoning. xAI also introduced DeepSearch, a feature that thoroughly scans the Internet and X to generate detailed responses to queries.[52]
In March 2025, xAI added an image editing feature to Grok, enabling users to upload a photo, describe the desired changes, and receive a modified version.[53] Alongside this, xAI released DeeperSearch, an enhanced version of DeepSearch that utilizes extended search and more reasoning. On X's mobile app, the feature is only accessible through the advanced options window.[54]
Notes
↑ The company was incorporated on this date. It was not officially announced until July 12, 2023.
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