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Elon Musk\u2019s AI company, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup working on AI-powered video generation tools along the lines of OpenAI\u2019s Sora<\/a>.<\/p>\n Aakash Sastry, Hotshot\u2019s CEO and co-founder, announced the news<\/a> in a post on X on Monday. <\/p>\n \u201cOver the past 2 years we\u2019ve built 3 video foundation models as a small team \u2014 Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,\u201d Sastry wrote. \u201cTraining these models has given us a look into how global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity are about to change in the coming years. We\u2019re excited to continue scaling these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as a part of xAI!\u201d <\/p>\n Hotshot, which is based in San Francisco, was founded several years ago by Sastry and John Mullan. The startup initially focused on developing AI-powered photo creation and editing tools, but eventually pivoted in favor of text-to-video AI models. <\/p>\n Hotshot managed to attract investments from VCs including Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel prior to its exit. The company never publicly disclosed the size of its funding rounds.<\/p>\n xAI\u2019s acquisition of Hotshot could indicate that the former plans to build its own video generation models to compete with the likes of Sora, Google\u2019s Veo 2<\/a>, and others. Musk has previously hinted that xAI is developing video-generating models to add to its Grok chatbot platform. During a live stream in January<\/a>, Musk said that he expects a \u201cGrok Video\u201d model to be released \u201cin a few months.\u201d<\/p>\n