x.ai
2024
Jesse Coors-Blankenship
Co-founder, General Partner
Gregg Hill
Co-founder, General Partner
Brian Hoyt
Chief Operations Officer
xAI is the developer of Grok, an artificial intelligence platform designed to accelerate human scientific discovery. The company's platform offers an artificial intelligence tool that assists humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge, processes long contexts within its context window and reasons about interleaved natural language and images, enabling clients to utilize information from substantially longer documents and advance the collective understanding of the universe.
2023
Founded by Elon Musk
2024
$136M Series A
2023
Grok-0 released
2024
$6B Series B, resulting in a $24B post-money valuation
When Elon Musk announced the launch of xAI and its large language model (LLM) Grok, Parkway joined in the first large-scale fundraising because we believe that xAI offers roughly the same features but a very different value proposition for investors.
The LLM market has become crowded, and over-valued, with too many “me too” products, which would inevitably lead to commoditization of the sector.
Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI (and also named the company), so he is very familiar with this technology. As a result, xAI offers similar functionality but a very different investment opportunity.
In particular, Grok will be optimized to focus on mathematics, physics and engineering, which will make it a very valuable technological tool that can be integrated into industries. Grok is also being optimised to respond truthfully in all instances, rather than with the significant political bias demonstrated by other LLMs.
In addition, unlike its main competitors, Grok is also open-source, which means engineers can see how it works and build their integrations accordingly, without worries about functionality. Grok also has a ready-made source of both information and of customers via Elon Musk’s many companies. Grok will be able to train on data from X (Twitter), Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and other Musk companies. Likewise, Grok will be deployed in Tesla motor vehicles, it will be uses to interface with Tesla’s humanoid robot (Optimus) and it is already deployed to X and available to premium users.
AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined.
Elon Musk
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, AI is placing enormous pressure on internet infrastructure. So Musk is using much of the $6B from xAI’s Series D fundraising, to build the world’s largest data center. When completed in 2025, the data center, which will host Grok, will be 4x larger than the largest data center currently in existence.
This new data center will allow xAI to scale much more rapidly than all the other LLMs, because it will have massively more compute power on which to both trai and deploy Grok. As a result, Parkway believes xAI will quickly surpass all its competitors in terms of performance, and be valued far in excess of its competitors.
