4 months ago
Elon Musk‘s xAI has raised $20B successful its latest backing around, amid backlash complete chatbot Grok creating sexualized imagery of women and children.
The institution said nan Series F backing information had exceeded a $15B target, pinch investors including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX and Baron Capital Group, on pinch erstwhile investors Nvidia and Cisco Investments.
The raise comes amid a immense backlash complete Grok, nan X chatbot. Grok Imagine was rolled retired precocious past year, allowing users to create deepfakes, including sexualized images. There person been galore reports of users asking for non-consensual designs of underage girls, including 1 successful nan The Guardian that recovered a picture of a 14-year-old Stranger Things actor successful a bikini.
This prompted a UK authorities curate to yesterday issue a statement demanding Musk stops Grok from creating nan images. British regulator Ofcom has besides made “urgent interaction pinch X, which past week issued a informing to users to debar forbidden imagery but has truthful acold not outwardly taken further steps. Regulatory probes are besides underway successful Malaysia and India, CNBC reported.
xAI said today’s rate raise would “accelerate our world-leading infrastructure buildout, alteration nan accelerated improvement and deployment of transformative AI products reaching billions of users, and substance groundbreaking investigation advancing xAI’s halfway mission: Understanding nan universe.”
In its merchandise today, X didn’t reside nan contention complete Grok Imagine, but called praised its chatbots “lightning-fast image and video procreation models that brings state-of-the-art multimodal understanding, editing, and procreation capabilities.”
xAI noted that nan latest incarnation of nan AI tool, Grok 5, is “currently successful training,” and that nan institution is “focused connected launching innovative caller user and endeavor products that harness nan powerfulness of Grok, Colossus, and 𝕏 to toggle shape really we live, work, and play.”
xAI has been nan genitor institution of Musk’s societal platform, X, pursuing an acquisition successful March past year.
