Elon Musk's investor group just revealed the full terms of its unsolicited $97.4B all-cash bid to buy OpenAI. The offer expires on May 10, 2025, requires complete access to internal records and staff, and promises to withdraw if OpenAI cancels its for-profit conversion. Why it matters: The bid aggressively forces OpenAI to defend its nonprofit assets or face intense public scrutiny.
Elon Musk just led an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid to acquire OpenAI, aiming to force the ChatGPT maker back into an open-source, safety-focused nonprofit with help from xAI. Sam Altman immediately laughed off the hostile takeover on X, sarcastically offering to buy Twitter back for $9.74 billion instead.
xAI just released a standalone iOS beta app for Grok in the US. The app delivers the same real-time info, answers, and image generation without needing to open X. After going free last month, Elon Musk's chatbot is ready to take on ChatGPT and Claude directly.
Elon Musk just revealed that xAI's upcoming Grok 3 has finished pretraining, using 10 times more compute than Grok 2. He added that the new flagship model is coming soon. Why it matters: xAI is rapidly scaling its infrastructure to challenge OpenAI and Google at the very top of frontier AI.
xAI just closed a massive $6 billion Series C funding round, pushing its valuation to $45 billion. Backed by Nvidia, AMD, and Sequoia, the fresh cash will help double its 100,000-GPU supercluster and accelerate the rollout of its next-generation Grok models.
OpenAI just published historical emails and timelines hitting back at Elon Musk's repeated lawsuits. The records reveal Musk himself pushed to turn OpenAI into a for-profit entity back in 2017 and even incorporated a company, but walked away after being denied majority control and the CEO role.
xAI just rolled out Aurora, a new autoregressive image generation model for Grok on X. Trained on billions of web examples, it tackles notoriously tough challenges like text rendering, logos, and photorealistic portraits, alongside native support for image editing inputs. It is now live in select countries and rolling out to all users within a week.
xAI just opened its Grok AI chatbot to all free users on X. Non-paying users can now send up to 10 prompts every two hours without a Premium subscription. It is a clear move to take on the free tiers of ChatGPT and Gemini, with reports suggesting a standalone app is also in the works.
Elon Musk just filed for a preliminary injunction to freeze OpenAI's transition into a for-profit corporation. The court filing accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of anticompetitive tactics, including blocking investors from backing rivals like xAI. OpenAI dismissed the filing as yet another baseless complaint.
Elon Musk's xAI is reportedly preparing to release a standalone consumer app to let people access the Grok chatbot directly, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The rollout will likely follow a fresh $5 billion funding round that could value the company at $50 billion.
Elon Musk just announced that his startup xAI is launching an AI-powered game studio to "make games great again." He argued that big corporations have made current gaming too ideological, though he offered no concrete details on tech, games, or release dates.
President-elect Trump is considering appointing a White House AI czar to steer federal policy and government tech adoption, Axios reports. Elon Musk won't take the job himself, but he and Vivek Ramaswamy are set to help pick who does. Because the post wouldn't require Senate confirmation, whoever gets the nod could start revamping regulations on day one.
Elon Musk just amended his federal lawsuit against OpenAI, officially naming Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and his own startup xAI as plaintiffs. The filing claims OpenAI and Microsoft effectively formed an anticompetitive "de facto merger" that actively shuts out rivals like xAI from vital funding and cloud compute.
Advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation just launched a petition urging President-elect Trump to appoint Elon Musk as a special White House AI adviser. The group says Musk uniquely balances technological advancement with AI safety, though critics point out potential conflicts of interest across his business empire.
X is finally testing free access to its AI chatbot Grok, kicking off with users in New Zealand. Previously locked behind a Premium paywall, the free tier caps Grok-2 at 10 queries every two hours and requires a phone-verified account. Opening up to non-paying users should give xAI a much broader feedback loop to take on ChatGPT.
Elon Musk's xAI just opened its API to the public, offering developers $25 in free monthly credits through the end of the year. The platform supports grok-beta with function calling and is compatible with OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs. Why it matters: At $5 per million input tokens, it is pricier than GPT-4o, but dropping in existing codebases requires almost zero friction.
xAI just rolled out image understanding to Grok, allowing paid subscribers on X to upload pictures and ask questions about them. Elon Musk noted that the model can even explain jokes and memes, though the feature is still in its early stages. It's the latest step to turn Grok multimodal and give users more reasons to pay for X.
Elon Musk just hosted an xAI recruiting event at OpenAI's original San Francisco headquarters on the same day as OpenAI's developer conference. Standing on a table, Musk pitched engineers on achieving AGI within a couple of years and promised to open-source xAI's models roughly nine months after release. Why it matters: Musk is aggressively targeting rival talent to challenge OpenAI head-on.
Black Forest Labs just launched Flux 1.1 Pro, an updated image generation model claiming six times faster generation speeds alongside improved visual quality and prompt adherence. The startup also launched a beta API, letting developers integrate the Flux model suite into their apps via its platform or partners like Replicate.
California lawmakers just passed SB 1047, sending the contentious AI safety bill to the governor's desk for signature. The legislation mandates that creators of massive AI models build and document safeguards against catastrophic harms. While Elon Musk surprisingly backed the bill, OpenAI remains firmly opposed.
