Silicon Valley tech giant xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, has announced the acquisition of Hotshot, a startup specializing in AI video generation. This strategic move will significantly boost xAI's capabilities in multi-modal AI technology.
Hotshot CEO Aakash Sastry announced the news on X (formerly Twitter), but the financial details of the acquisition remain undisclosed. Backed by prominent investors including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and SV Angel, Hotshot (officially Natural Synthetics Inc.) has developed unique technological advantages in AI video generation.
Founded in 2023, Hotshot initially focused on AI image generation and editing tools. In 2024, it shifted its focus to video generation, launching an AI model capable of producing high-quality videos with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels and a length of up to 10 seconds. Their development process involved several cutting-edge techniques: They used 6 million video clips as training data and built a second neural network to automatically generate captions for these videos, significantly improving the AI model's understanding of video content and streamlining the training process.
Technically, Hotshot's video generator uses the bfloat16 data format, compressing 32-bit information into 16 bits. This significantly reduces the amount of data the AI model needs to process, increasing computational efficiency and training speed. The video generator's training took four months and utilized thousands of Nvidia A100 GPUs – a fraction of the 200,000 Nvidia chips in xAI's Colossus supercomputer.
In the X post announcing the acquisition, Sastry stated that Hotshot will "continue to scale" its video generator development, leveraging the immense computing power of Colossus. This supercomputer, the core infrastructure supporting xAI's AI models, is housed in a 750,000-square-foot facility in Memphis, formerly a home appliance factory. The initial version of Colossus, launched last September, featured 100,000 graphics cards; three months later, an upgraded version with 200,000 chips and over 1 EB (exabyte) of storage capacity went online.
Earlier this year, xAI acquired a second Memphis site to support infrastructure upgrades. The company plans to increase Colossus's graphics card count to 1 million by the end of the year. As part of this expansion, xAI is reportedly negotiating with Dell Technologies for the purchase of over $5 billion worth of AI servers.
xAI's foray into video generation is not unexpected. In January, Elon Musk reportedly stated that xAI planned to release a video generation model within months. The company will likely offer this algorithm through its application programming interface (API), running in parallel with its flagship large language model series, Grok.
This acquisition not only signifies Musk's further investment in AI technology but also heralds a new wave of breakthroughs and commercial applications in AI video generation. We eagerly await the innovative results of this powerful collaboration.
