Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has acquired AI video startup Hotshot for an undisclosed amount, as it seeks to add video generation to its Grok chatbot.
Hotshot can convert text prompts into short videos, similar to OpenAI’s Sora or Google’s Veo.
“Over the past 2 years we've built 3 video foundation models as a small team — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” said Hotshot CEO Aakash Sastry.
“Training these models has given us a look into how global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity are about to change in the coming years.”
Hotshot said it had been sunsetting the creation of new videos from 14 March, with users given until 30 March to download their existing Hotshot videos.
Grok 3, a new version of xAI’s Grok AI chatbot, was released last month. An AI voice generator was later added, and Musk said in January that xAI plans to integrate a video creator into Grok.
This would give Grok similar abilities to OpenAI’s models. OpenAI video generator Sora is in the process of rolling out worldwide, having been released in Europe and the United Kingdom last month.
Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are due in court in December, following a lawsuit from Musk seeking to halt OpenAI’s transition into a for-profit enterprise. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the company, has accused OpenAI of straying from its original non-profit vision, though Altman has denied this.
Hotshot included investors like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and investment firm SV Angel, although it did not disclose its valuation or the amounts raised in funding rounds.
xAI has reportedly been planning a US$10 billion funding round, which would bring the company’s valuation to $75 billion. It previously raised US$6 billion in a Series C funding round in December.
It is also reportedly readying a deal to buy US$5 billion in artificial intelligence servers from Dell, which would include graphics processing units from Nvidia.
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