Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has acquired Hotshot, a startup working on AI-based video creation tools similar to OpenAI’s Sora.
Aakash Sastry, CEO and co-founder of Hotshot, announced the news in a post on X on Monday.
“Over the past 2 years, we have built 3 video creation models with a small team – Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “Learning these models has given us insight into how global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity will change in the coming years. We are excited to continue to scale these efforts on the world’s largest cluster, Colossus, as part of xAI!”
San Francisco-based Hotshot was founded several years ago by Sastry and John Mullan. Initially, the startup focused on developing tools for creating and editing photos with artificial intelligence, but later shifted to AI models for converting text to video.
Prior to its release, Hotshot managed to attract investments from venture capitalists such as Laci Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel. The company has never publicly disclosed the size of its funding rounds.
The acquisition of xAI by Hotshot may indicate that the former plans to create its own video generation model to compete with the likes of Sora, Google’s Veo 2, and others. Elon Musk has previously hinted that xAI is developing video generation models to add to its Grok chatbot platform. During a livestream in January, Musk said that he expects the Grok Video model to be released “in a few months.”
On its website, Hotshot said that on March 14, the sunset for creating new videos began. Existing customers will have until March 30 to download videos created using the platform, the company added.
It was not immediately clear whether all of Hotshot’s staff would join xAI. Sastry declined to comment.
