The Wall Street Journal reported thatElon Musk's space exploration technology company SpaceX has pledged to invest $20 billion in Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, giving it additional funds to build AI application services that can compete with OpenAI.
The report pointed out that before this large investment, xAI had completed its merger with the social platform "X", formerly Twitter, which increased its overall market valuation to US$1130 billion.
Elon Musk is attempting to build a complete AI ecosystem covering everything from communication infrastructure to application scenarios by integrating his companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, "X" and xAI. This is clearly intended to compete with the growing OpenAI and technology giants such as Google and Meta.
Currently, xAI's conversational AI, Grok, is being used in SpaceX's Starlink satellite communications customer service. The company also plans to integrate Grok into Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot, enhancing its conversational understanding and task execution capabilities. Elon Musk has called Grok "the smartest AI on Earth" and emphasized its continued optimization toward the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Analysts point out that Elon Musk's choice to invest in xAI through SpaceX not only reflects his strategic determination to develop a presence in the AI field, but also shows that SpaceX, as a flagship business with strong cash flow and technological capabilities, is becoming a key resource for promoting the rapid development of xAI.
In contrast, since the launch of GPT-4, OpenAI has become the world's most highly anticipated generative AI platform. Competitors like Meta, Google, and Anthropic have also continuously strengthened their respective AI model portfolios, leading to increasingly fierce competition. Against this backdrop, it will be interesting to see whether xAI can rapidly catch up through its advantages in funding, technology, and platforms.
In recent developments, xAI has announced the launch of support for multi-agent, high-intensity training, and emotional speech.Grok 4, which includes a single-agent version and Grok 4 Heavy with multi-agent collaboration capabilities. It supports up to 4 agent tasks running simultaneously, and is equipped with the context length content understanding capability corresponding to 25.6 tokens, allowing AI to more effectively handle long texts and complex tasks.
Tesla earlier announced that it would apply Grok AI to certain of its models, allowing owners to chat and interact with the AI assistant while driving. Tesla also stated that all models delivered in the United States starting July 7 this year will have built-in Grok AI functionality. Previously sold and launched models will download updates via OTA depending on the status of their software and hardware. This includes upgrades for models equipped with AMD infotainment processors and using vehicle systems version 12 or later.
However, an update error earlier in the day caused Grok to generate a series of hate speech on the "X" platform for 16 hours, including positive portrayals of controversial historical figures such as Hitler, sparking backlash from users and the public. xAI subsequently issued an apology via its official account, stating that the issue stemmed from an "accidentally triggered legacy code path" and emphasizing that the problem did not stem from the underlying language model but rather from an oversight in the processing architecture.
The company has promised to remove the relevant code and restructure the system to prevent the same problem from happening again. It also announced that it will release new prompt word design logic to improve the model's judgment and stability in specific situations.
