xAI and X. Elon Musk’s companies, whose similar names are inspired by their common boss’ favorite letter, will form a single entity. On Friday, March 28, the entrepreneur and advisor to Donald Trump, announced that his artificial intelligence (AI) start-up was buying his social network for $45 billion (€41.6 billion).
Musk is thereby upping his bet on synergies between, on the one hand, his business of manufacturing large AI models and his chat bot Grok and, on the other hand, a distribution platform and a database of content for AI training.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” Musk said on X, on Friday. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent,” he added. Some of these collaborations were already ongoing, as Musk has adopted a consortium logic that regularly combines activities and interests of his various entities, from the car manufacturer Tesla to the space company SpaceX, including the satellite operator Starlink and the designer of brain-machine interfaces Neuralink. X and xAI have also shared premises in San Francisco. Yet these cooperative exchanges are now being formalized and reinforced.
Multimedia training data
Created in 2023, xAI quickly benefited, for the training of its models, from privileged access to the vast quantity of texts, images and videos published on X by users. Finding multimedia training data that is as recent as possible is one of the challenges for manufacturers of AI models such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta. The latter, for example, claims to train its AIs on public content shared by users of its social media networks Facebook and Instagram.
xAI also contributes its Colossus supercomputer, launched in September 2024 near Memphis, USA, and touted as one of the most powerful in the world, with 100,000 state-of-the-art Nvidia chips.
For xAI, access to X is also a valuable distribution channel for its assistant Grok. From its launch in November 2023, Grok was accessible to premium subscribers of the social media network, and then in December 2024, it was made available free of charge to its 600 million members. The latter benefit from an assistant available on the platform. In return, Grok enjoys an interesting advantage in the fierce competition with other assistants such as ChatGPT (OpenAI).
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