Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup engaged on AI-powered video era instruments alongside the strains of OpenAI’s Sora.
Aakash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, announced the news in a publish on X on Monday.
“Over the previous 2 years we’ve constructed 3 video basis fashions as a small crew — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “Coaching these fashions has given us a glance into how international schooling, leisure, communication, and productiveness are about to vary within the coming years. We’re excited to proceed scaling these efforts on the biggest cluster on the planet, Colossus, as part of xAI!”
Hotshot, which relies in San Francisco, was based a number of years in the past by Sastry and John Mullan. The startup initially centered on growing AI-powered picture creation and modifying instruments, however finally pivoted in favor of text-to-video AI fashions.
Some information – We’re excited to announce that @HotshotSupport has been acquired by @xAI 🚀
Over the previous 2 years we have constructed 3 video basis fashions as a small crew – Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot.
Coaching these fashions has given us a glance into how international schooling,… pic.twitter.com/W4rmYUxnMR
— Aakash (@aakashsastry) March 17, 2025
Hotshot managed to draw investments from VCs together with Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel previous to its exit. The corporate by no means publicly disclosed the scale of its funding rounds.
xAI’s acquisition of Hotshot may point out that the previous plans to construct its personal video era fashions to compete with the likes of Sora, Google’s Veo 2, and others. Musk has beforehand hinted that xAI is growing video-generating fashions so as to add to its Grok chatbot platform. During a live stream in January, Musk mentioned that he expects a “Grok Video” mannequin to be launched “in just a few months.”
Hotshot said on its site that it started sunsetting new video creation on March 14. Present prospects can have till March 30 to obtain movies they’ve created utilizing the platform, the corporate added.
It wasn’t instantly clear whether or not the complete Hotshot employees can be becoming a member of xAI. Sastry declined to remark.
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