Elon Musk's xAI buys Hotshot, a generative AI video company

AI-powered services have made enormous strides since ChatGPT revolutionized the segment a few years ago. OpenAI’s chatbot boasted incredible capabilities that have since been already far surpassed. Some companies have focused on multimedia—images and videos—generation models. Elon Musk’s xAI seems to be getting serious with its latest acquisition: the generative AI video startup Hotshot.

xAI’s acquisition of a generative AI video startup suggests major improvements for Grok

“Over the past two years, we’ve built three video foundation models as a small team—Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” said Aakash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, about the development. “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,” he added.

Hotshot was born as a startup to develop image generation and editing tools. However, the company later moved into generative AI for videos. It had already caught the attention of major investors, receiving funding from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Lachy Groom, and SV Angel.

It’s expected that Hotshot’s capabilities will eventually come to Grok. That said, there are no details yet on it. It’s noteworthy that the Hotshot website stopped allowing the creation of new videos on March 14th. This was a hint of what was to come. Hotshot’s users have until March 30th to download all their generated videos.

Some news – We're excited to announce that @HotshotSupport has been acquired by @xAI Read More