Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has acquired the startup Hotshot, which specializes in AI-powered video generation tools similar to OpenAI’s Sora.
Aakash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, announced the acquisition on the platform X on Monday. He noted that over the past two years, Hotshot has developed three video foundation models—Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot—as a small team. According to Sastry, training these models has provided insight into the upcoming changes in global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity. He expressed enthusiasm about expanding these efforts using Colossus, the largest cluster in the world, as part of xAI.
Based in San Francisco, Hotshot was founded by Sastry and John Mullan several years ago. Initially, the company focused on AI-powered photo creation and editing tools before shifting its focus to text-to-video AI models. Prior to the acquisition, Hotshot secured investments from venture capitalists such as Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel. However, the company never publicly disclosed the sizes of its funding rounds.
The acquisition by xAI suggests that the company might be planning to develop its own video generation models to compete with existing technologies like Sora and Google’s Veo 2. Elon Musk has previously hinted at xAI’s development of video-generating models to integrate with its Grok chatbot platform. In a live stream in January, Musk mentioned the expected release of a “Grok Video” model within a few months.
Hotshot has announced on its website that it began winding down new video creation on March 14. The company mentioned that existing customers will have until March 30 to download videos created using the platform.
It remains unclear whether all of Hotshot’s staff will transition to xAI. Aakash Sastry declined to comment on the matter.
