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Elon Musk ’s AI party , xAI , has acquired Hotshot , a startup work on AI - power video propagation tool along the lines of OpenAI’sSora .
Aakash Sastry , Hotshot ’s CEO and carbon monoxide - founding father , announced the newsin a post on X on Monday .
“ Over the past 2 years we ’ve built 3 TV foundation framework as a small squad — Hotshot - XL , Hotshot Act One , and Hotshot , ” Sastry indite . “ Training these modeling has given us a feeling into how global instruction , amusement , communicating , and productiveness are about to change in the follow years . We ’re excited to cover scaling these efforts on the expectant bunch in the world , Colossus , as a part of xAI ! ”
Hotshot , which is based in San Francisco , was launch several years ago by Sastry and John Mullan . The startup initially centre on develop AI - power photo creation and editing tools , but eventually pivoted in favour of schoolbook - to - video AI models .
Some tidings – We ’re excited to announce that@HotshotSupporthas been acquired by@xAI 🚀
Over the past 2 geezerhood we ’ve built 3 video foundation models as a small team – Hotshot - XL , Hotshot Act One , and Hotshot .
Training these model has give us a look into how world education, … pic.twitter.com / W4rmYUxnMR
— Aakash ( @aakashsastry)March 17 , 2025
Hotshot managed to attract investments from VCs admit Lachy Groom , Reddit carbon monoxide - founder Alexis Ohanian , and SV Angel prior to its going . The company never publicly expose the size of its funding circle .
xAI ’s skill of Hotshot could indicate that the former plans to build its own picture generation models to contend with the likes of Sora , Google’sVeo 2 , and others . Musk has previously hinted that xAI is developing television - generating mannequin to total to its Grok chatbot platform . During a livestream in January , Musk said that he expects a “ Grok Video ” model to be released “ in a few month . ”
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Hotshotsaid on its sitethat it began sunsetting young picture creation on March 14 . Existing customers will have until March 30 to download videos they ’ve create using the political platform , the company added .
It was n’t like a shot clear whether the entire Hotshot staff would be connect xAI . Sastry declined to comment .
