Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup engaged on AI-powered video era instruments alongside the strains of OpenAI’s Sora.
Aakash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, introduced the information in a publish on X on Monday.
“Over the previous 2 years we’ve constructed 3 video basis fashions as a small crew — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “Coaching these fashions has given us a glance into how international training, leisure, communication, and productiveness are about to vary within the coming years. We’re excited to proceed scaling these efforts on the biggest cluster on the planet, Colossus, as part of xAI!”
Hotshot, which is predicated in San Francisco, was based a number of years in the past by Sastry and John Mullan. The startup initially targeted on creating AI-powered photograph creation and enhancing instruments, however ultimately pivoted in favor of text-to-video AI fashions.
Hotshot managed to draw investments from VCs together with Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel previous to its exit. The corporate by no means publicly disclosed the dimensions of its funding rounds.
xAI’s acquisition of Hotshot might point out that the previous plans to construct its personal video era fashions to compete with the likes of Sora, Google’s Veo 2, and others. Musk has beforehand hinted that xAI is creating video-generating instruments. Throughout a stay stream in January, he mentioned that he expects a “Grok Video” mannequin to be launched “in a couple of months.”
Hotshot mentioned on its web site it started sunsetting new video creation on March 14. Present clients can have till March 30 to obtain movies they’ve created utilizing the platform, the corporate added.
It wasn’t instantly clear whether or not your entire Hotshot employees can be becoming a member of xAI.
