Elon Musk’s AI startup has made its first acquisition, with video generation project Hotshot announcing that xAI has purchased its business.
Hotshot, which has built a range of text-to-video and text-to-GIF AI models, has been gaining traction among AI enthusiasts for its rapidly developing AI video models.
And now, that technology will be incorporated into xAI’s stack, which could soon see X users able to generate video clips from text within the app.
Well, paying X users at least.
As announced by Hotspot:
“Over the past 2 years we’ve trained 3 video foundation models – Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot. We see these video models as an early look into the future of learning, entertainment, communication and more. We’re excited to continue scaling these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as a part of xAI.”
xAI’s “Colossus” supercomputer cluster in Memphis was put together in 122 days, and now hosts 200k Nvidia H100 GPUs, bringing the project into line with the computing power of other major AI projects.
That’ll give the Hotshot team a heap more resources to drive their ambitions, which should see advanced text-to-video capacity coming to X’s Grok chatbot sometime soon.
Indeed, in response to the announcement, X Corp chief Elon Musk has simply remarked that:
As noted, this is xAI’s first acquisition after it gained more than $12 billion in funding from a range of donors over the past two years.
The project is separate from X the social media app, though both come under the “X Corp” business portfolio, while the two also feed into each other, with X posts powering xAI projects, and xAI’s Grok chatbot now available in the X app.
So while they are separate, they’re also intrinsically connected, which could theoretically enable Musk to funnel funds from xAI to X if needed.
The broader hope, however, is that xAI will eventually become an entity of its own, with real-time insights from X providing a more valuable AI tool for active engagement and trend insight. That could be valuable in a range of ways, though usage of X’s Grok chatbot still seems fairly limited at this stage.
Maybe video creation will be a key step in boosting Grok adoption, and making it a more viable competitor for OpenAI and Meta’s AI projects.
I mean, OpenAI is who Elon really wants to hit, for personal reasons, but Meta’s also pushing to be the AI leader, and with Musk and Co. previously blasting rival AI projects as being “too woke”, xAI could also be a hedge against what he sees as overt censorship within AI tools.
Either way, it’s another step in the broader AI race, which could help to keep xAI in the game. I’m not sure that it’ll be able to keep pace with Meta, which is investing another $65 billion into AI development this year alone, but Musk also has the inside running on the pending AI overhaul of the U.S. government, which could see xAI gain a lot of lucrative development contracts.
It’s a conflict of interest, of course, but it seems likely that xAI will be a leading candidate, at the least, for this effort.
