All kinds of signs show that as the former world's richest man Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is approaching its first anniversary, the company is accelerating its layout in the AI field, and its mapping to the capital market is also strengthening.
According to the latest report, xAI is not only competing with Musk's "old rival" Zuckerberg, but also talking about customization robot The opportunity to cooperate with the team Character.ai, and the company's news on computing power construction is also quite eye-catching.
"A narrow road" with Zuckerberg
After Musk acquired Twitter (now renamed X), he and Meta boss Zuckerberg became direct competitors. and The unique demand of social media platforms for customized chat AI also makes them knock at the door of Silicon Valley startup Character.ai.
Character.ai is a company specialized in developing AI chat robot creation platform, It is committed to creating a chat robot that simulates the language style of real characters (such as Huang Renxun, Einstein) or virtual characters (such as a character in the game "Original God") 。
("Einstein Robot" created by users and published on the platform, source: Character. ai) It is worth emphasizing that Noam Shazeer, the founder of Character.ai, was one of the authors of the Google Transformer paper that year. After many years, these Google researchers who have created a new pattern of AI have embarked on the path of entrepreneurship.
(The authors of Transformer's papers gathered at this year's Nvidia GTC Conference, Noam Shazeer on the second left, source: Nvidia) According to several insiders, Both Meta and xAI had early discussions with Character.ai, mainly involving research cooperation, such as model development and pre training.
Meta has previously said that it is integrating AI character chat robots to its Facebook, Instagram and other platforms, including some robots that "play celebrities". At the same time, xAI has also developed a chat robot, Grok, for paid subscribers on the X platform.
For Musk and Zuckerberg, they also have an advantage in developing exclusive character AI that other technology giants do not have - they have a lot of social media data in their hands.
Build "Computational Power Super Factory"
In the AI field, it is also necessary to continue to spend money on accounting.
According to the report of the science and innovation media The Information on Saturday, in an investor demonstration in May this year, Musk said that xAI plans to build a super computer with amazing specifications, which will be a "computing power super factory".
Earlier this year, Musk revealed that, About 20000 Nvidia H100 GPUs will be required to train the Grok 2 model, while 100000 Nvidia H100 chips will be required to train the next generation model and higher versions.
What is quite in line with the style of Muskhoomei is that he is going to string all the chips into a "supercomputer". He told investors that, If this project can be completed, it will be at least four times the size of the largest GPU cluster in existence today. Musk also said that he would step down personally to promote the operation of this machine in the autumn of 2025, and added that he might cooperate with Oracle to develop this huge computer.
Although Tesla is also developing Dojo supercomputing, the "Superfactory of Computing Power" still has to queue up to buy Nvidia's chips. In Nvidia's Blackwell press release in March this year, Musk said publicly that Nvidia's AI hardware is "the best" 。
(Source: Nvidia) It is worth mentioning that in the middle of this month, there was news that xAI was close to reaching a cloud computing power supply agreement with Oracle that lasted for many years and was worth "10 billion dollars", which once pushed up Oracle's share price. While continuously purchasing computing power, xAI has built its own "computing power super factory". xAI's posture of catching up with the market leader has undoubtedly emerged.
A person familiar with the matter said that, XAI is financing with a valuation target of $24 billion and plans to raise more than $6 billion in the next few weeks. It is roughly estimated that this amount of money is enough to buy 200000 H100 chips.
From the perspective of AI manufacturers, $6 billion is only enough for 1-2 years. Musk himself once admitted that to be competitive at the AI track at this stage, it will cost at least several billion dollars every year.
Extraneous remarks: AI Big Boss laid out the "Pan AI Track" early
With Nvidia once again handing over the financial report to verify AI's prosperity last week, the US stock market also showed a new trend - in addition to speculating in chip stocks, capital also began to operate power, power plants, electrical equipment, photovoltaic and other sectors related to supporting data centers.
Musk needn't say that Tesla has a mature energy storage business and is also a supplier of many photovoltaic power plants and photovoltaic equipment manufacturers.
Oklo, a nuclear fission startup invested by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also entered the US stock market in the middle of this month. Jacob DeWitte, the CEO of the company, said in an interview last week that 80% of the customers who have asked about power procurement are data center operators. He expected that this situation would be just the "tip of the iceberg", and there would be more demand for data centers in the future.
Oklo announced last week that it had signed a power supply agreement for a 100 MW data center park. However, the company has not yet obtained the permission to build small nuclear power plants, and DeWitte also said that it is unlikely that there will be any power plants put into operation before 2027.
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