Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has acquired two-year-old AI video startup Hotshot, amid its push to accelerate innovation in multimodal foundation models. These foundation models are essentially large AI models that can process and comprehend different kinds of data including video, audio, images, and text in a single unified system.

Announcing the acquisition in a post on X, HotShot’s Co-founder and CEO Aakash Sastry said over the past two years the company has built three video foundation models – Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot.  

Training these models, said Sastry, “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!” 

Responding to the announcement by Sastry, Musk said, “Cool video AI coming soon!”.

Hotshot has been exploring advanced generative models in video to change the way content is created. It has been working on advanced generative video models that aim to transform how content is created in different sectors such as communication, entertainment, education and others.  

The deal indicates xAI’s plans to improve its capabilities beyond text-based models, focusing on multimodal systems that can create and understand video content at scale. 

While Sastry didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal, he expressed gratitude to Hotshot’s team including investors Shan Aggarwal, Alexis Ohanian, Lachy Groom, SV Angel, and Ari Silverschatz and customers. 

Hotshot team will now work under xAI’s infrastructure including Colossus – reportedly the largest AI supercomputer in the world which is used to train xAI’s Grok family of large language models, with chatbots offered as a feature for X Premium subscribers. 

Founded in 2023, Musk’s xAI aims to compete with large players such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic in developing artificial general intelligence. The acquisition of Hotshot is likely to boost xAI’s depth in video intelligence, a space that is fast evolving as the next big frontier in generative AI.