xAI Acquires Text-to-Video AI Project Hotshot | Social Media Today
Elon Musk’s AI startup has made its first acquisition, with video generation project Hotshot announcing that xAI has purchased its business.
Hotshot, which has built a range of text-to-video and text-to-GIF AI models, has been gaining traction among AI enthusiasts for its rapidly developing AI video models.
Hotshot's Video Models
Over the past 2 years, Hotshot has trained 3 video foundation models - Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot. These video models are seen as an early look into the future of learning, entertainment, communication, and more. Hotshot is excited to continue scaling these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as part of xAI.
xAI’s “Colossus” supercomputer cluster in Memphis was put together in 122 days and now hosts 200k Nvidia H100 GPUs, bringing the project in line with the computing power of other major AI projects.
Future Developments
With the acquisition, xAI aims to incorporate Hotshot's technology into its stack, allowing X users to potentially generate video clips from text within the app. The enhanced resources from xAI will drive ambitions, leading to advanced text-to-video capacity in X’s Grok chatbot in the near future.
Elon Musk, CEO of X Corp, expressed his excitement about the upcoming video AI features.
As noted, this acquisition follows xAI's significant funding of over $12 billion in the past two years, enabling the company to expand its AI projects and capabilities.
AI Integration and Competition
Although xAI operates separately from the social media app X, both entities fall under the “X Corp” portfolio, creating synergies between them. The integration of X posts into xAI projects and the availability of xAI’s Grok chatbot in the X app demonstrate the interconnectedness of the two platforms.
The broader goal is for xAI to evolve into a standalone entity, leveraging real-time insights from X to enhance AI tools for active engagement and trend analysis. While the current usage of X’s Grok chatbot may be limited, the potential for video creation features could boost adoption and position X as a competitive player against other AI projects like those from OpenAI and Meta.
Industry Outlook
As the AI race intensifies, xAI strives to stay competitive, especially against industry giants like Meta investing billions in AI development. Elon Musk's involvement in the forthcoming AI overhaul of the U.S. government could further propel xAI's growth by securing lucrative development contracts.
Despite potential conflicts of interest, xAI is poised to be a top contender in this endeavor, showcasing its capabilities in the evolving AI landscape.
