ecently, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI has managed to purchase a generative AI video startup called Hotshot. This startup is known worldwide
for its past operations that were focused over working on different video generation tools powered by AI including those tools that are used in OpenAI’s Sora video AI tool.
The Chief Executive Officer from Hotshot, Aakash Sastry made this new deal public on its X account, but without additional details such as financial terms.
“Over the past 2 years we’ve built 3 video foundation models as a small team — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,”, the CEO stated in his X post.
The Hotshot company secured funding not long ago from Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit Inc. co-founder along with other investors, but the amount of this support remained undisclosed.
Launched for the first time in 2023, Hotshot, also known by its previous name - Natural Synthetics Inc., became popular based on its image generation and editing tools powered by artificial intelligence. The following year, Hotshot gained extra visibility after the launch of a video generation model, which is capable of generating 10-second clips with a resolution of 1080 x 720 pixels.
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“Training these models has given us a look into how global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity are about to change in the coming years. We’re excited to continue scaling these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as a part of xAI!”, Aakash Sastry also stated.
This Elon Musk xAI acquisition could potentially indicate the fact that Musk is planning to launch for its Grok AI a video generation model in order to compete with others in the AI industry such as Sora from OpenAI, Veo 2 from Google, and many others. It should be mentioned that in the past, Elon Musk suggested that is working to add a video generation model to its chatbot Grok AI, potentially called “Grok Video”, as he stated during a January livestream.
According to the Hotshot website, the company already closed down the video creation tool for potential new users. But, for the existing users who created different videos using the Hotshot tools, the company gave a 15-day window in order to download all their work, before being deleted automatically.
We don’t know for sure if all the employees and Hotshot staff members will join Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, due to the fact that the CEO declined to comment about this.
Stay tuned for more updates!
