xAI acquires Hotshot to strengthen the layout of AI video generation

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI recently announced the acquisition of video generation startup Hotshot, which is an important layout for Musk in the field of AI video generation. Hotshot CEO Aakash Sastry confirmed the news on social platform X and said the team will continue to expand the development of video basic models on xAI's Colossus cluster.

Founded by Sastry and John Mullan, Hotshot initially focused on AI-powered photo creation and editing tools, then moved to text-to-video AI model development. The acquisition may indicate Musk plans to build his own video generation model, competing with OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo2. Musk had previously hinted that xAI was developing a video generation model and integrating it into the Grok chatbot platform.

Hotshot website announcement shows that the company has stopped creating new videos on March 14, and existing customers can download videos they created using the platform by March 30. It is not clear whether all members of the Hotshot team are added to xAI, and Sastry declined to comment.