The latest venture of Elon Musk in the field of Artificial Intelligence, referred to as xAI, stands on the verge of reaching an impressive $18 billion valuation following its most recent round of funding, as indicated by reports from Bloomberg. Musk laid the foundation for xAI back in July of 2023, with the main aim of entering the market as a strong competitor against OpenAI, driven in part by the widespread popularity of its ChatGPT chatbot.

Toward the end of April, reports emerged depicting xAI's imminent finalization of a substantial funding deal amounting to $6 billion, with significant participants showing interest, including Sequoia Capital. The startup first introduced its generative AI chatbot, Grok, to subscribers who opted for premium service on the X social media platform in the month of December.

In the month of March, xAI introduced Grok-1.5, which was an improved version capable of handling complex coding and mathematical tasks. Despite the recent funding achievement by xAI, it faces an intimidating task in surpassing OpenAI's current remarkable valuation standing at a staggering $80 billion.

The AI landscape is currently experiencing a surge in significant investments in various startup ventures. For instance, Perplexity, a search-based startup, managed to secure a notable $63 million funding round, thereby increasing its overall valuation to $1 billion. On a similar note, Atlan recently reached a valuation of $750 million following a successful round of fundraising totaling up to $105 million. Going further, Wayve, a self-driving startup based in the United Kingdom, received a substantial funding boost of $1 billion from Softbank, while Mistral and Aleph Alpha also joined the list of startups obtaining substantial funding rounds.