In the field of artificial intelligence, Elon Musk once again demonstrated his strategic vision. Recently, his artificial intelligence company xAI officially announced the acquisition of video generation startup Hotshot, which undoubtedly dropped a bombshell in the field of AI video generation. Hotshot CEO Aakash Sastry confirmed the news on social platform X, marking the official merger of the two companies.
The Hotshot team has achieved remarkable achievements over the past two years, successfully developing three basic video models: Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One and Hotshot. The research and development of these models not only demonstrates the huge potential of AI technology in the field of video generation, but also points out the direction for future development in education, entertainment, communications and productivity. Sastry said that after joining xAI, the team will have the opportunity to continue to scale these innovative efforts on Colossus, the world's largest cluster.
Hotshot's entrepreneurial journey is exciting. The San Francisco-based company initially focused on AI-powered photo creation and editing tools, then keenly captured market trends and turned to text-to-video AI model development. After receiving support from well-known investors such as Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and SV Angel, Hotshot has rapidly emerged in the field of AI video generation and has become a new star in the industry.
Behind this acquisition, Musk's strategic intentions are obvious. He is planning to build his own video generation model to compete head-on with competitors such as OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo2. In fact, Musk had previously hinted that xAI is developing a video generation model and plans to integrate it into the Grok chatbot platform. During a live broadcast in January this year, he boldly predicted that the "Grok video" model would be released in a few months, showing strong confidence in this field.
With the completion of the acquisition, Hotshot's business has also entered a new stage. According to the company's website announcement, Hotshot has stopped creating new videos on March 14, and existing customers can download videos they created using the platform by March 30. Although it is not clear whether all members of the Hotshot team will join xAI, Sastry remains silent about this, indicating that the two sides may be undergoing a deeper integration.