News of the day
1. Elon Musk's xAI successfully closes a $20 billion Series E financing round, surpassing its initial target and signaling strong investor confidence in its AI development ambitions. → Read more
2. Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI assistant platform Manus is caught in a regulatory tug-of-war, with Chinese regulators reportedly reviewing potential violations of technology export controls, while U.S. regulators appear assured of the deal's legitimacy. → Read more
3. NVIDIA AI Releases Nemotron Speech ASR: A New Open Source Transcription Model Designed from the Ground Up for Low-Latency Use Cases like Voice Agents → Read more
4. Amazon's AI shopping tool lists products from other retailers without consent, raising ethical and legal concerns among sellers.→ Read more
Our take
Hi Dotikers!
Yesterday, we were talking about DeepSeek researchers describing their work as "incremental refinement." Today, different vibe: Elon Musk raises $20 billion for xAI and announces a 10% chance of reaching artificial general intelligence with Grok 5. Two philosophies, two worlds.
The funding round exceeded the initial $15 billion target. Nvidia, Cisco, Qatar Investment Authority, and Fidelity are all chipping in. The valuation likely tops $230 billion, placing xAI just behind OpenAI in the AI unicorn race. The numbers are staggering. Colossus I and II, the in-house supercomputers, run on over a million H100 GPUs. Grok 5 is in the works with 6 trillion parameters. And xAI claims 600 million monthly active users—though most are just X users who happen to bump into Grok along the way.
But there's an elephant in the room. Several, actually. Grok has had multiple antisemitic slip-ups, praised Hitler in some responses, and since late 2025, its image editing tool lets you virtually undress people—including minors. The model initially pitched as a quest for "maximum truth" has morphed into an ideological tool systematically skewed to the right. System prompts explicitly encourage avoiding mainstream opinions. When your chatbot generates sexualized images of children and you raise $20 billion the next day, you have to wonder whether investor due diligence included anything beyond revenue projections.
Jensen Huang said he was "super excited" to participate in this round. No doubt about that.
A.
Meme of the day
