Tech Desk 
Mar 18, 2025
An undated image of Grok logo. — Grok
In the midst of a raging war of artificial intelligence (AI), tech billionaire Elon Musk has made a move to stand out of the crowd: acquiring Hotshot, a startup working on AI video generation to compete with OpenAI's Sora.
Hotshot's acquisition by xAI, Musk's AI startup known for developing AI chatbot Grok, was confirmed by Hotshot CEO and co-founder Aakash Sastry in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Monday, TechCrunch reported.
“Over the past 2 years we’ve built 3 video foundation models as a small team — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry tweeted.
“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 post added.
Founded in collaboration by Sastry and John Mullan some years ago, the San Francisco-based startup initially ventured into the development of AI image-generation tools, but later on devoted its focus to text-to-video AI models.
Successfully securing substantial funding rounds from venture capitals (VCs) like Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel is what gives a nod to Hotshot's potential.
