Bloomberg reports that Elon Musk's AI startup xAI is currently burning through about $1 billion every month. The main drivers are steep infrastructure and chip costs for building its Grok chatbot. According to Bloomberg's sources, xAI expects to lose $13 billion in 2025 while bringing in just $500 million in revenue. The company is aiming for profitability by 2027. To keep operations running, xAI is planning a $4.3 billion capital raise and is also seeking $5 billion in debt. In total, the company wants to bring in $9.3 billion, with more than half of that expected to be spent within the next three months. At the start of the year, xAI still had about $4 billion in cash. Compared to competitors like OpenAI, which expects around $12.7 billion in revenue for 2025, xAI is lagging far behind in monetization.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly offering OpenAI researchers signing bonuses of up to $100 million and even higher annual salaries as part of a major recruitment push. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticized these tactics on the "Uncapped" podcast with his brother Jack Altman, saying that such offers ultimately undermine Meta's company culture. Altman argued that Meta puts too much focus on money instead of mission and meaningful work, and noted that no one at OpenAI has accepted the offers so far. He also said Meta's previous AI projects have not lived up to expectations and described the company as not especially innovative.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly now personally recruiting researchers for a superintelligence team. A key part of this strategy is an acqui-hire of Scale AI, the data labeling and infrastructure company, for nearly $15 billion.
OpenAI has released a demo of an AI-powered tool for automated front-end testing on GitHub. The tool uses its Computer-Using Agent (CUA) and the Playwright open-source framework to generate, run, and evaluate test cases based on written descriptions. OpenAI says the goal is to make software testing more efficient and reliable. The project is currently a concept study and still in early stages.
