xAI Acquires Textual content-to-Video AI Undertaking Hotshot

Elon Musk’s AI startup has made its first acquisition, with video era undertaking Hotshot saying that xAI has bought its enterprise.

Hotshot, which has constructed a variety of text-to-video and text-to-GIF AI fashions, has been gaining traction amongst AI fanatics for its quickly creating AI video fashions.

And now, that expertise might be included into xAI’s stack, which may quickly see X customers in a position to generate video clips from textual content throughout the app.

Properly, paying X customers not less than.

As introduced by Hotspot:

“Over the previous 2 years we have educated 3 video basis fashions – Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot. We see these video fashions as an early look into the way forward for studying, leisure, communication and extra. We’re excited to proceed scaling these efforts on the most important cluster on the earth, Colossus, as part of xAI.”

xAI’s “Colossus” supercomputer cluster in Memphis was put collectively in 122 days, and now hosts 200k Nvidia H100 GPUs, bringing the undertaking into line with the computing energy of different main AI tasks.

That’ll give the Hotshot crew a heap extra sources to drive their ambitions, which ought to see superior text-to-video capability coming to X’s Grok chatbot someday quickly.

Certainly, in response to the announcement, X Corp chief Elon Musk has merely remarked that:

As famous, that is xAI’s first acquisition after it gained greater than $12 billion in funding from a variety of donors over the previous two years.

The undertaking is separate from X the social media app, although each come beneath the “X Corp” enterprise portfolio, whereas the 2 additionally feed into one another, with X posts powering xAI tasks, and xAI’s Grok chatbot now obtainable within the X app.

So whereas they’re separate, they’re additionally intrinsically linked, which may theoretically allow Musk to funnel funds from xAI to X if wanted.

The broader hope, nonetheless, is that xAI will ultimately turn into an entity of its personal, with real-time insights from X offering a extra invaluable AI device for energetic engagement and development perception. That may very well be invaluable in a variety of the way, although utilization of X’s Grok chatbot nonetheless appears pretty restricted at this stage.

Possibly video creation might be a key step in boosting Grok adoption, and making it a extra viable competitor for OpenAI and Meta’s AI tasks.

I imply, OpenAI is who Elon actually desires to hit, for private causes, however Meta’s additionally pushing to be the AI chief, and with Musk and Co. beforehand blasting rival AI tasks as being “too woke”, xAI is also a hedge in opposition to what he sees as overt censorship inside AI instruments.

Both approach, it’s one other step within the broader AI race, which may assist to maintain xAI within the recreation. I’m unsure that it’ll be capable to preserve tempo with Meta, which is investing one other $65 billion into AI growth this yr alone, however Musk additionally has the within operating on the pending AI overhaul of the U.S. authorities, which may see xAI achieve quite a lot of profitable growth contracts.

It’s a battle of curiosity, after all, however it appears probably that xAI might be a number one candidate, as a minimum, for this effort.