xAI announced this weekend that its Series B funding round entailed nearly $6 billion dollars in investment. The roster of investors include industry stalwarts such as Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz and many more. The news comes at a time when AI in general is at the peak of the hype cycle, with record funding, significant resources toward research and all-time high stock valuations, and the work that xAI is doing has significant potential to disrupt healthcare.
The company was announced just a year ago, in July 2023, with the mission to build artificial intelligence technologies “to accelerate human scientific discovery.” xAI, led by Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has made significant progress since then, including the launch of its proprietary conversational AI model, Grok. Musk, who also owns X (formerly Twitter), released Grok for premium users across the X platform, significantly adding to the user base and learning capacity for the AI model.
The most obvious entry point for xAI in healthcare is similar to what other large technology companies are attempting to do: increase task automation, improve clinical workflows and optimize clinician productivity. Technology giants are investing billions of dollars creating and training foundation models so that they can easily fit into the day-to-day healthcare workflow.
For example, this may entail embedding a foundation model into a radiology practice which can help provide an initial read of a radiology image, or scribing technology that can listen to physician-patient encounters to summarize patient notes, or even enterprise models that can provide physicians with the ability to search medical records and glean insights from large swaths of data. Once mature enough, xAI has significant potential to disrupt this game in a similar manner and provide its own version of these services.
Uniquely, however, there is significant opportunity for Musk to bring together his parallel interests with his company Neuralink, which has seen significant success in the last few years with its brain-computer interface technology.
