Elon Musk is seeking to raise $1bn for his new AI company

He has raised $135m so far from four unnamed investors

Multi-billionaire chief of Tesla and X Corp owner Elon Musk is raising $1bn for his new artificial intelligence company xAI, a new filing has revealed.

The filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission showed that the start-up has raised $134.7m in equity financing from a total offering amount of $1bn.

Mr Musk announced the formation of the AI company in July in a tweet, sharing that its goals are “to understand reality”.

xAI also unveiled the names of its employees earlier this year, including people who have “previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto”.

The Tesla titan started the company after tech giants including Google and Microsoft, as well as the AI firm OpenAI behind ChatGPT continued to invest heavily in the technology.

Mr Musk was also a co-founder of OpenAI but stepped down from the firm’s board in 2018 to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla which had its own AI operations.

He has hinted previously that he was planning to start his own AI firm, even mentioning in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he would develop a “maximum truth-seeking AI”.

So far xAI has been working on the AI tool Grok – a chat-based system similar to ChatGPT.

The multi-billionaire says Grok is both smarter and funnier than its rivals by answering “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems”.

“Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak. Please don’t use it if you hate humour!” a blog post announcing the AI system’s launch noted.

Mr Musk said last month that the xAI startup would be integrated into his social media platform X, and also be available as a standalone app.

Now, the new filing reveals the Tesla boss has raised about $135m so far for xAI from four unnamed investors, suggesting he still needs $865m from investors to reach his $1bn goal.