Elon Musk’s AI startup has made its first acquisition, with video technology challenge Hotshot saying that xAI has bought its enterprise.
Hotshot, which has constructed a spread of text-to-video and text-to-GIF AI fashions, has been gaining traction amongst AI fans for its quickly creating AI video fashions.
And now, that know-how shall be integrated into xAI’s stack, which might quickly see X customers capable of generate video clips from textual content inside the app.
Effectively, paying X customers a minimum of.
As introduced by Hotspot:
“Over the previous 2 years we have skilled 3 video basis fashions – Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot. We see these video fashions as an early look into the way forward for studying, leisure, communication and extra. We’re excited to proceed scaling these efforts on the most important cluster on this planet, Colossus, as part of xAI.”
xAI’s “Colossus” supercomputer cluster in Memphis was put collectively in 122 days, and now hosts 200k Nvidia H100 GPUs, bringing the challenge into line with the computing energy of different main AI initiatives.
That’ll give the Hotshot workforce a heap extra sources to drive their ambitions, which ought to see superior text-to-video capability coming to X’s Grok chatbot someday quickly.
Certainly, in response to the announcement, X Corp chief Elon Musk has merely remarked that:
As famous, that is xAI’s first acquisition after it gained greater than $12 billion in funding from a spread of donors over the previous two years.
The challenge is separate from X the social media app, although each come below the “X Corp” enterprise portfolio, whereas the 2 additionally feed into one another, with X posts powering xAI initiatives, and xAI’s Grok chatbot now obtainable within the X app.
So whereas they’re separate, they’re additionally intrinsically linked, which might theoretically allow Musk to funnel funds from xAI to X if wanted.
The broader hope, nevertheless, is that xAI will finally turn into an entity of its personal, with real-time insights from X offering a extra precious AI instrument for energetic engagement and development perception. That might be precious in a spread of the way, although utilization of X’s Grok chatbot nonetheless appears pretty restricted at this stage.
Possibly video creation shall be a key step in boosting Grok adoption, and making it a extra viable competitor for OpenAI and Meta’s AI initiatives.
I imply, OpenAI is who Elon actually needs to hit, for private causes, however Meta’s additionally pushing to be the AI chief, and with Musk and Co. beforehand blasting rival AI initiatives as being “too woke”, xAI is also a hedge towards what he sees as overt censorship inside AI instruments.
Both method, it’s one other step within the broader AI race, which might assist to maintain xAI within the recreation. I’m unsure that it’ll be capable of hold tempo with Meta, which is investing one other $65 billion into AI growth this yr alone, however Musk additionally has the within working on the pending AI overhaul of the U.S. authorities, which might see xAI achieve a number of profitable growth contracts.
It’s a battle of curiosity, after all, nevertheless it appears probably that xAI shall be a number one candidate, in any case, for this effort.
