Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup working on AI-powered video generation tools along the lines of OpenAI’s Sora.
Akash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, announced the news in a post on X on Monday.
“Over the past 2 years we’ve built 3 video foundation models as a small team — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “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!”
Hotshot, which is based in New York, was founded several years ago by John Mullan and Duncan Crawbuck. The company initially focused on developing AI-powered photo creation and editing tools, but eventually pivoted in favor of text-to-video AI models.
Hotshot managed to attract investments from VCs including Lachy Groom, Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel prior to its exit.
