Timeline of xAI
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This is a timeline of FIXME, a company founded by Elon Musk with the mission to develop and advance artificial intelligence technologies with a focus on understanding and addressing complex challenges in the universe. The company aims to create advanced AI models and tools, such as the Grok series of conversational AI models, to push the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can achieve in various domains.
Contents
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Big picture
| Time period | Development summary | More details |
|---|
Full timeline
| Year | Month and date | Event type | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | March 9 | Company Formation | xAI is founded by Elon Musk in Nevada, with its headquarters established in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. The company aims to "understand the true nature of the universe." |
| 2023 | July 12 | Official Announcement | Elon Musk officially announces the formation of xAI. He links the date (7 + 12 + 23 = 42) to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, which emphasizes the number 42 as the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. This connection is tied to xAI's mission to understand the universe.[1] |
| 2023 | 18 August | Grok-0 | The first flagship model, Grok-0, is completed. It is a 33B parameter dense transformer architecture.[1] |
| 2023 | 3 November | Grok-1 | The early-access release of the conversational AI Grok and the Grok-1 model is announced. Hundreds of early-access users begin using Grok.[1] |
| 2023 | November 4 | Product Launch | xAI unveils Grok, an AI chatbot integrated with the X platform. Initially released in beta, xAI announces that Grok would be available exclusively to X's Premium+ subscribers once the beta phase concluded. |
| 2023 | November 6 | PromptIDE | The early-access release of PromptIDE, an integrated development environment for prompt engineering, is announced.[1] |
| 2023 | November 6 | Product Launch | xAI released PromptIDE, an integrated development environment (IDE) designed for prompt engineering and interpretability research. PromptIDE includes tools such as a Python code editor and rich analytics, enabling users to explore and refine prompts for large language models, including Grok-1. |
| 2023 | 15 November | Grok API | The first SDK is released and close partners begin using the Grok API.[1] |
| 2023 | 7 December | Grok on X | X users subscribed to X Premium+ are given access to use Grok on the X website and apps.[1] |
| 2023 | December | Funding Disclosure | xAI discloses in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that it has raised $134.7 million in outside funding, out of a potential total of $1 billion. Despite this, Elon Musk would later claim on X (formerly Twitter) that the company was not seeking any funding. |
| 2024 | March 17 | Grok-1 open source release | xAI announces the open release of Grok-1, a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts large language model. Grok-1's base model weights and architecture are available under the Apache 2.0 license, marking it as a significant contribution to the open-source community. The model, trained from scratch using JAX and Rust, is not fine-tuned for specific tasks but provides a raw checkpoint from its pre-training phase completed in October 2023. Instructions for accessing and using Grok-1 are provided on GitHub, and the release includes a cover image generated with Midjourney.[1][2] |
| 2024 | March 28 | Grok-1.5 | The improved flagship model, Grok-1.5, is completed. It demonstrates enhanced performance in reasoning and coding.[1] |
| 2024 | March 29 | Product Upgrade | xAI announces Grok-1.5, an upgraded version of the AI model featuring improved reasoning capabilities and a significantly expanded context length of 128,000 tokens. |
| 2024 | March | Product Expansion | Grok is made available to all X Premium subscribers, expanding access beyond the previously limited Premium+ subscriber base. |
| 2024 | 12 April | Grok-1.5V | Vision capabilities are added to Grok-1.5, allowing it to reason about interleaved natural language and images.[1] |
| 2024 | April 12 | Product Upgrade | Grok-1.5 Vision (Grok-1.5V) is announced. This version of the model can process a wide range of visual information, including documents, diagrams, graphs, screenshots, and photographs. |
| 2024 | 15 May | Grok-1.5 on X | Grok-1.5 becomes available on X, continuing the integration of advanced AI features for users.[1] |
| 2024 | May 27 | xAI securea $6 billion in new funding, increasing its valuation to $24 billion. The investment round, which includes major contributions from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, aim to support xAI's market entry, infrastructure development, and future technology research. xAI's funding reflects the growing investor interest in AI technology despite the challenges faced in the field.[3] During this time, Musk also predicts that AI will make most jobs obsolete, leading to a need for universal basic income. | |
| 2024 | June | Infrastructure Development | The Greater Memphis Chamber announces that xAI plans to build the world's largest supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. The supercomputer, expected to be the most advanced AI model, is scheduled to become fully operational in December 2024. However, the project raises concerns regarding electricity usage, with peak power demands reaching 150 megawatts. To address these concerns temporarily, the company deploys 14 VoltaGrid gas generators. |
| 2024 | August | Product Launch | Grok-2 is made available to X Premium subscribers. This new version introduces image generation capabilities, marking a significant advancement in the Grok series. |
| 2024 | September 3 | xAI unveils its new AI training system, Colossus, equipped with 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics cards. Colossus is described by Musk as the world’s most powerful AI training system, potentially surpassing the U.S. Energy Department’s Aurora system. The system's H100 GPUs, known for their high performance, are capable of running language models up to 30 times faster than previous generations. xAI plans to expand Colossus to 200,000 chips, including newer H200 GPUs with improved speed and memory. This upgrade aims to enhance AI model development, with xAI targeting the release of its next large language model, Grok-3, by year-end.[4] |
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How the timeline was built
The initial version of the timeline was written by FIXME.
Funding information for this timeline is available.
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See also
External links
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 "About x.ai". x.ai. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
- ↑ "Introducing Grok OS: The Operating System for AI". x.ai. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
- ↑ "Elon Musk's AI firm xAI raises $6 billion, boosting valuation to $24 billion". CNN. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
- ↑ "Elon Musk's xAI Launches Colossus AI Training System with 100,000 NVIDIA Chips". SiliconANGLE. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
