Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, acquires a generative AI video startup
The AI company of Elon Musk, Xai, has taken over Hotshot, a startup that works on AI-driven video money tools in the style of OpenAi’s Sora.
Akash Sastry, CEO and co-founder of Hotshot, announced the news In a message on X on Monday.
“In the past 2 years we have built 3 video fund models as a small team-hot-xl, hotshot act one and hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “Training these models has given us a look at how worldwide education, entertainment, communication and productivity are about to change in the coming years. We are pleased to continue to scale up these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as part of Xai! ”
Hotshot, based in New York, was founded a few years ago by John Mullan and Duncan Crawbuck. The company initially focused on the development of AI-driven photo creation and editing tools, but ultimately played for text-to-video AI models.
Hotshot managed to attract investments from VCs, including Lachy Groom, co-founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian and SV Angel prior to the exit.
Xai’s Acquisition of Hotshot could indicate that the former plans to build his own models for generating video facilities to compete with Sora, Google’s VEO 2 and others. Musk has previously hinted that Xai is developing the tools for generating videos. During a live stream in JanuaryHe said he expected a “grok video” model “to be released in a few months”.
