War Chest Multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is getting ready to take on the big boys of the industry. On Sunday, the company announced that it had raised a whopping $6 billion during its latest round of funding, putting it in closer competition with bitter rivals OpenAI. In fact, xAI is now the second most valuable AI startup in the world, The Wall Street Journal reported, with a valuation of $24 billion. But it still has some catching up to do. OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, absolutely blows that sum out of the water with an over $80 billion valuation of its own. That being said, xAI is not even a year old yet. Musk founded the startup in July last year, and to send his pet project into the uppermost echelon of the industry, he’s called on his usual litany of investors, many of whom also backed his Twitter (now X) takeover. (Apparently, they haven’t learned their lesson yet.) These include the titanic Silicon Valley VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and foreign backers such as Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal at the Kingdom Holdings group. “The funds from the round will be used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” the company wrote in its announcement. Scant Offerings xAI’s flagship product is its AI chatbot called Grok, released in November. The potty-mouthed ChatGPT clone was trained on users’ posts made on X…Elon Musk’s AI Company Announces Ungodly Sum of Money to Beat OpenAI