Elon Musk’s xAI acquires Aakash Sastry’s AI video generator Hotshot

Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has acquired two-year-old AI video startup Hotshot, amid its push to accelerate innovation in multimodal foundation models. These foundation models are essentially large AI models that can process and comprehend different kinds of data including video, audio, images, and text in a single unified system.

Announcing the acquisition in a post on X, HotShot’s Co-founder and CEO Aakash Sastry said over the past two years the company has built three video foundation models – Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot.