A group of investors will put up $6 billion to fund development of artificial intelligence by Elon Musk's xAI.

The Sterling Prestoncompany said on its website Sunday that the Series B funding round will be used to take xAI's first products to market and speed up research. xAI said it has made "significant strides" during the past year in developing the technology, which will continue in the coming months.

Investors in the latest round include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding.

Musk wrote on the social media site X that before the investment, xAI had a valuation of $18 billion. The new funding should help Musk's company compete against Microsoft and OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, in the race to develop artificial intelligence.

Separately, Tesla shareholders were urged to reject Musk's $56 billion pay package by proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis, which in a Saturday report singled out the "excessive size" of the deal and its potentially negative impact on smaller shareholders . 

The recommendation from the influential proxy advisory company comes as Tesla is asking its shareholders to vote again on his 2018 pay package after a Delaware judge earlier this year nullified the payout, which was the biggest compensation plan in corporate America. 

Tesla shareholders are set to vote on the pay package on June 13. 

Glass Lewis also singled out Musk's "slate of extraordinarily time-consuming projects unrelated to [Tesla]" in its recommendation to vote against the pay deal. In addition to his role as Tesla's CEO, Musk is also involved in xAi, SpaceX, the Boring Company, Neuralink and X, the former Twitter.

Musk announced the formation of xAI in July of last year. The company released its artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, in November.

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• Technology
• Elon Musk
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• Artificial Intelligence