Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup engaged on AI-powered video era instruments alongside the traces of OpenAI’s Sora.
Aakash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, introduced the information in a publish on X on Monday.
“Over the previous 2 years we’ve constructed 3 video basis fashions as a small group — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “Training these fashions has given us a glance into how international training, leisure, communication, and productiveness are about to vary within the coming years. We’re excited to proceed scaling these efforts on the biggest cluster on the planet, Colossus, as part of xAI!”
Hotshot, which relies in New York, was based a number of years in the past by Sastry, John Mullan, and Duncan Crawbuck. The firm initially centered on growing AI-powered picture creation and modifying instruments, however ultimately pivoted in favor of text-to-video AI fashions.
Hotshot managed to draw investments from VCs together with Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel previous to its exit. The firm by no means publicly disclosed the scale of its funding rounds.
xAI’s acquisition of Hotshot may point out that the previous plans to construct its personal video era fashions to compete with the likes of Sora, Google’s Veo 2, and others. Musk has beforehand hinted that xAI is growing video-generating instruments. During a reside stream in January, he stated that he expects a “Grok Video” mannequin to be launched “in just a few months.”
Hotshot stated on its web site it started sunsetting new video creation on March 14. Existing clients can have till March 30 to obtain movies they’ve created utilizing the platform, the corporate added.
It wasn’t instantly clear whether or not the complete Hotshot workers could be becoming a member of xAI.
