Crypto Giggle
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI raised $6 billion recently in a Series B round of funding, which boosted the venture’s valuation to $24billion. Valor Equity Partners was one of the investors, along with Vy Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. Sequoia Capital also participated. Musk believes Grok will be a serious competitor for ChatGPT before the end of this year. Musk remains cautious, despite xAI’s rapid growth and development. Musk predicts that AI capabilities will exceed human abilities by the year 2025. Kai-Fu Lee, an AI expert, also predicts that AI will replace 50% of global workers by 2027.
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Musk’s xAI attracts Big Investors
Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence venture, xAI has successfully finished a series B funding of $6 billion. This round attracted investment from some well-known firms such as Valor Equity Partners (Vy Capital), Andreessen Horowitz (Sequoia Capital), Fidelity Management & Research Company(Fidelity), Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.
The valuation of xAI has now reached $24 billion. This is a huge achievement, considering that the company was only founded 11 months earlier in July 2023.
OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) has a market value of more than $80 billion. This is three times higher than that of xAI. OpenAI, on the other hand was founded in December 2015 and had an 8-year lead.
The funds raised will help xAI improve its research and development for its AI system to launch its first product. xAI has a mission to create advanced AI systems which are honest, competent and helpful for mankind. The goal is also to understand the nature of the Universe.
xAI’s AI team has made impressive advances in the development of AI and launched Grok-1 last November, its first AI-based chatbot. Grok-1.5 was upgraded in April and now has image-understanding abilities that allow it to handle documents, diagrams charts screenshots photos. In March, the network architecture for Grok-1 also became open source.
Musk thinks Grok will be a serious competitor for ChatGPT before the year 2024. However, he admits that xAI has a long way to go to catch established players such as Google DeepMind or OpenAI.
Musk remains concerned by the rapid growth of AI despite his involvement with xAI. Musk joined over 2,600 other tech experts to call for a stop on AI developments in March because of potential dangers it could pose to humanity and society.
xAI will Build a “Gigafactory for Compute”
Elon Musk’s xAI also plans to build a powerful supercomputer with Oracle in order to run the next generation of “Grok”, its AI large-language model. According to a report by The Information referring to a presentation given to xAI stakeholder, the project is described as a “Gigafactory for Compute”, which will be used to develop the next version of Grok AI.
Musk initially planned to raise $ 4 billion for xAI at a valuation of $15 billion, and increase the GPU count to 100,000. This goal was increased due to the high level of investor interest.
These funds are likely to be used for the conversion of the 100,000 GPU clusters into a unified architecture supercomputer that resembles Tesla’s “Gigafactories”.
xAI Grok
Grok, an artificially intelligent chatbot created by xAI. The chatbot was launched in 2023, and it is only available for users who have a subscription Premium+ to social media platform X.
Grok-1 is the language model that powers Grok. It was developed using a customized tech stack, including Kubernetes JAX and Rust. This allowed for faster development compared to any other chatbots. Grok has been trained using extensive internet text and real-time updates on X. This gives Grok a huge advantage when it comes to maintaining current knowledge.
Grok has two different interaction modes: “Fun Mode”, which is the default, and “Regular Mode,” which can generate incorrect information. The “Regular Mode”, while delivering more accurate information, may also produce false or conflicting data.
Musk’s favourite book, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” inspired Grok’s sense of humor and his personality. It is likely that the name “Grok,” which means a deep understanding, comes from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Musk hinted that this was the case by posting “Stranger in a Strange Land,” on X, after Grok announced his plans.
AI will surpass humans by 2025
Elon Musk has recently shared once more his belief that AI will lead to the displacement of jobs, and humans need “universal incomes”. Elon Musk even said that “without jobs” our goal might be to give AI meaning.
Musk expressed his concern at the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris that AI will eventually be able to provide every good and service, outperforming humans on all tasks. Musk questioned humans’ future roles and said that machines could outperform them in every area, which would make our lives meaningless. He speculated, however, that AI could still have meaning for humans if they give it a purpose.
Musk said that humans could work for a hobby, if desired. However, he painted a grim future in which AI will replace people at all levels. He said that AI will surpass the human capabilities as early as 2025.
Musk’s AI forecasts haven’t always been accurate. Musk promised to have 1 million Tesla robotaxis fully autonomous by 2020. This goal was never achieved.
Kai-Fu Lee’s Prediction of Job Displacement
Musk’s AI predictions and beliefs are not unique. Kai-Fu Lee, a computer scientist and venture capitalist who recently spoke about his predictions that AI will eventually replace half the world’s workforce by 2027.
Lee made the prediction for AI in 2017. He has maintained this since. He said in an interview with IEEE Spectrum that many jobs, such as truck driving, telemarketing and dishwashing or picking fruit, are repetitive. This makes them vulnerable to AI replacing.
Lee confirmed this prediction in a recent Fortune interview and said that the predictions have proven “uncannily correct.” In a recent interview with Fortune, Lee reaffirmed this prediction and stated that it has proven to be “uncannily accurate.” Lee is convinced that AI technology will be more important than both electricity and internet.
Lee’s career is impressive. He has worked at Apple as an executive, was the director and founder of Microsoft Research Asia and vice president and head of Google China. He is now the chairman and founder of Sinovation Ventures – a venture fund focused on global technology products and services – and of 01.AI – an AI startup aimed at the Chinese market.
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