Elon Musk’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, has acquired an AI video generator, Hotshot. The startup announced the news on Monday.
“We’re excited to announce that Hotshot has been acquired by xAI,” wrote the startup on its website’s landing page. Hotshot further said that it has started sunsetting new video creation and existing hotshotters have until March 30th to download the videos they’ve created on the platform.
In a post on X, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder Aakash Sastry said the startup has developed three video foundation models—Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot and is “excited to continue scaling” its efforts at the Elon Musk-owned xAI.
“Over the past 2 years we’ve built 3 video foundation models as a small team — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “Training these models has given us a look into how global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity are about to change in the coming years. We’re excited to continue scaling these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as a part of xAI!”
The San Francisco-based startup founded by Sastry and John Mullan was initially focused on developing AI-powered photo creation and editing tools before it pivoted to text-to-video AI models competing in the same space as OpenAI’s Sora launched in December last year.
xAI move to acquire Hotshot suggests the company is gearing up to compete with OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 2, potentially integrating video capabilities into its Grok chatbot.
Previously Musk hinted that xAI was developing video-generating models to add to its Grok chatbot platform saying that he expects a “Grok Video” model to be released “in a few months” while on a Livestream in January.
