xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company behind the Grok chatbot – well have an X – announced that it has raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round.
The company wrote in post a blog that investors will include Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, and others, including Nvidia and Cisco as “strategic investors.” xAI has not disclosed whether the investment is equity or debt.
xAI says there are around 600 million monthly active users of X and Grok, and it will use this new funding to continue expanding its data center and Grok model.
However, as xAI increases, so does the capacity to do harm. This past weekend, user X asked Grok to make sexual deepfakes of real people – including children. Instead of refusing the request or activating any guardrails, Grok complied, effectively producing child sexual material (CSAM) and other nonconsensual sexual content from real people.
xAI now investigated by international authorities in the European Union, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, and France.