The expansion of Silicon Valley technology giants adds a new chapter! The xAI company owned by Elon Musk announced today the acquisition of Hotshot, a startup focused on video generation AI technology. This strategic acquisition will inject new vitality into xAI in the field of multimodal AI technology.
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Hotshot CEO Aakash Sastry officially announced the news on the X platform, but did not disclose the specific transaction amount. As a new technology company that has been backed by well-known investors such as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and SV Angel, Hotshot (officially named Natural Synthetics Inc.) has accumulated unique technological advantages in the field of AI video generation.
Founded in 2023, Hotshot initially focused on AI image generation and editing tools, and then turned to the field of video generation in 2024, launching an AI model that can generate high-quality videos with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels and up to 10 seconds. The company has adopted a number of cutting-edge technologies during its research and development: they used 6 million video clips as training data and specially built a second neural network to automatically generate explanatory text for these videos. This move significantly improves the AI model's ability to understand video content, thereby simplifying the entire training process.
In terms of technical implementation, Hotshot's video generator adopts the bfloat16 data format, which can compress 32-bit information to 16-bit, greatly reducing the amount of data that the AI model needs to process during the calculation process, and improving computing efficiency and training speed. The video generator was trained for four months and used thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics processors, just a fraction of the 200,000 Nvidia chips equipped with the xAI supercomputer Colossus. In an X post that announced the acquisition, Sastry said Hotshot will "continue to expand" its video generator development efforts to make full use of Colossus' powerful computing power.
As the core infrastructure supporting the xAI artificial intelligence model, the Colossus supercomputer is deployed in a 750,000-square-foot Memphis facility, previously a home appliance factory. The original version of Colossus was launched in September last year and was equipped with 100,000 graphics cards; three months later, the upgraded version of Colossus was put into use, and in addition to 200,000 chips, it also has more than 1EB (1 exeb byte) of storage capacity.
Earlier this year, xAI acquired a second site in Memphis to support infrastructure upgrades. The company plans to increase the number of Colossus graphics cards to 1 million by the end of the year. xAI has reportedly negotiated with Dell Technologies to purchase more than $5 billion worth of AI servers as part of this expansion plan.
It is no surprise that xAI enters the video generation field. In January this year, Elon Musk reportedly said that xAI plans to release video generation models within a few months. The company will likely provide this algorithm through its application program interface, operating in parallel with its flagship large language model series Grok.
This acquisition not only marks Musk's further layout in the field of AI technology, but also indicates that AI video generation technology is about to usher in a new round of technological breakthroughs and commercial application explosion. Let us wait and see what innovative achievements this powerful alliance will bring in the future.