Elon Musk’s AI startup has made its first acquisition, with video era mission Hotshot asserting 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 expertise will probably be integrated into xAI’s stack, which might quickly see X customers in a position to generate video clips from textual content inside the app.
Nicely, 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 biggest cluster on the 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 mission into line with the computing energy of different main AI tasks.
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 mission 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 tasks, and xAI’s Grok chatbot now accessible within the X app.
So whereas they’re separate, they’re additionally intrinsically related, which might theoretically allow Musk to funnel funds from xAI to X if wanted.
The broader hope, nonetheless, is that xAI will finally turn into an entity of its personal, with real-time insights from X offering a extra worthwhile AI device for energetic engagement and pattern perception. That might be worthwhile in a spread of the way, although utilization of X’s Grok chatbot nonetheless appears pretty restricted at this stage.
Perhaps video creation will probably be a key step in boosting Grok adoption, and making it a extra viable competitor for OpenAI and Meta’s AI tasks.
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 tasks as being “too woke”, xAI may be a hedge in opposition to 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 undecided that it’ll be capable to preserve tempo with Meta, which is investing one other $65 billion into AI improvement this yr alone, however Musk additionally has the within operating on the pending AI overhaul of the U.S. authorities, which might see xAI acquire loads of profitable improvement contracts.
It’s a battle of curiosity, after all, nevertheless it appears seemingly that xAI will probably be a number one candidate, as a minimum, for this effort.
