Elon MuskxAI's xAI Raises $20 Billion in Its Latest Funding Amid Backlash Over Chatbot Grok creating sexualized images of women and children.
The company said the Series F funding round exceeded its $15 billion target, with investors including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX and Baron Capital Group, as well as previous investors Nvidia and Cisco Investments.
The promotion comes amid a huge backlash against Grok, chatbot X. Grok Imagine launched late last year and allows users to create deepfakes, including sexually explicit images. There have been numerous reports of users asking to create images of underage girls without consent, including one in Guardian that I found a photo of a 14-year-old boy Stranger Things actor in bikini.
This prompted a British government minister yesterday make a declaration Musk's demand to stop Grock from creating the images. British regulator Ofcom has also made “urgent contact with X, which last week warned users to avoid using illegal images but has so far apparently taken no further steps. Regulatory investigations are also underway in Malaysia and India, CNBC reported.
xAI said today's fundraising will “accelerate the building of our world-leading infrastructure, enable the rapid development and deployment of transformative artificial intelligence products reaching billions of users, and fuel groundbreaking research that advances xAI's core mission: understanding the universe.”
In its release today, X didn't address the controversy surrounding Grok Imagine, but called its chatbots “lightning-fast image and video generation models that provide state-of-the-art multimodal insight, editing and generation capabilities.”
xAI noted that the latest version of its artificial intelligence tool, Grok 5, is “currently in the training phase” and that the company is “focused on delivering innovative new consumer and enterprise products that leverage the power of Grok, Colossus and 𝕏 to change the way we live, work and play.”
xAI was the parent company of the social platform Mask X. acquired in March last year.
