The AI ​​company from Elon Musk, Xai, acquires a generative AI video startup

The AI ​​company of Elon Musk, Xai, has acquired Hotshot, a startup that works on tools for AI-driven video in the Sora of Openaai.

Aakash Sastry, CEO and co -founder of Hotshot, announced the news in a post on X on Monday.

“Over the past 2 years, we have built 3 video foundation models as a small team-hot-hot XL, Hotshot Act One and Hotshot,” wrote Sastry. “The training of these models gave us a look at how global education, entertainment, communication and productivity will change in the coming years. We are pleased to continue to scale these efforts to scalate the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as part of Xai! ”

Hotshot, based in San Francisco, was founded a few years ago by Sastry and John Mullan. The startup initially focused on the development of AI-driven photo creation and editing tools, but finally turned in favor of text-to-video AI models.

Hotshot managed to attract investments from VCS such as Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and SV Angel before he left. The company has never publicly announced the size of its financing rounds.

Xai's takeover of Hotshot could indicate that the former plans to create their own models for videoogenization to compete with Sora, Google's Veo 2 and others. Musk previously indicated that Xai developed video generating models to expand its GROK chatbot platform. During a live stream in January, Musk said that he would expect a “Grok Video” model “to be released in a few months”.

Hotshot said on his website that it started with a new video creation on March 14th. Existing customers will have to download videos that they have created with the platform by March 30, added the company.

It was not immediately clear whether the entire Hotshot employee would join Xai. Sastry refused to comment.