xAI

xAI is an artificial intelligence company founded on March 9, 2023 by Elon Musk and Christian Szegedy. Musk established xAI to counter what he called the political correctness in other generative AI models, recruiting engineers from Google, Microsoft, DeepMind, and OpenAI. The company's signature product is Grok, an AI chatbot modeled after Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, known for its wit, sarcasm, and real-time access to data from the social media platform X.

Key Milestones:

• Mar 2023: Founded by Elon Musk and Christian Szegedy with 12 co-founders
• Nov 2023: Launched Grok-1 on X, initially for Premium subscribers
• Mar 2024: Released Grok-1 as open source (314B parameter MoE model)
• Aug 2024: Grok-2 launched with image generation capabilities
• Dec 2024: Released Aurora text-to-image model
• Feb 2025: Launched Grok-3, showcasing major reasoning improvements
• Mar 2025: Acquired X (formerly Twitter) in an all-stock deal valuing the combined entity at $113 billion
• Jul 2025: Released Grok 4 (single-agent) and Grok 4 Heavy (multi-agent) with 2M token context windows
• Feb 2026: SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal valuing xAI at $250B and SpaceX at $1T, ahead of a combined IPO expected to value the entity at $1.25 trillion

Grok Model Timeline:

• Grok-1: 314B MoE, open-sourced
• Grok-1.5 / 1.5 Vision (Mar–Apr 2024): Improved reasoning and vision capabilities
• Grok-2 (Aug 2024): Image generation, available to X Premium users
• Grok-3 (Feb 2025): Major performance leap in reasoning and coding
• Grok 4 / Grok 4 Heavy (Jul 2025): Single-agent and multi-agent variants, 2M context, advanced agentic capabilities

Colossus Supercomputer: xAI operates Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee - currently the world's largest AI supercomputer. Originally built with 200,000+ Nvidia GPUs, it expanded in January 2026 to 555,000 GPUs across three buildings, reaching 2 gigawatts of total capacity. The hardware investment alone exceeds $18 billion. Colossus is designed for training frontier-scale models.

Valuation & Funding:

• $230 billion valuation after $20B Series E (late 2025)
• $250 billion in SpaceX merger (Feb 2026)
• Combined SpaceX-xAI IPO targeting ~$1.25 trillion valuation
• Musk has told staff AGI could be achieved by 2026

Team & Leadership: Elon Musk (CEO), Christian Szegedy (co-founder). Notable early team included Igor Babuschkin, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, and Jimmy Ba - though 6 of the original 12 co-founders have since departed.