Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup working on AI-powered video generation tools along the lines of OpenAI’s Sora.
Akash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, announced the news in a post on X on Monday.
“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!”
Hotshot, which is based in New York, was founded several years ago by Sastry, John Mullan, and Duncan Crawbuck. The company initially focused on developing AI-powered photo creation and editing tools, but eventually pivoted in favor of text-to-video AI models.
Hotshot managed to attract investments from VCs including Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel prior to its exit.
xAI’s acquisition of Hotshot could indicate that the former plans to build its own video generation models to compete with the likes of Sora, Google’s Veo 2, and others. Musk has previously hinted that xAI is developing video generation tools. During a live stream in January, he said that he expects a “Grok Video” model to be released “in a few months.”
