Elon Musk's xAI company has acquired a video startup that works on the analogy of OpenAI's Sora

Elon Musk-founded xAI has announced the acquisition of Hotshot, a startup that specializes in developing tools for generating videos using artificial intelligence, Hotshot CEO Aakash Sastri announced on his X page (via TechCrunch).

Hotshot, founded in San Francisco by Aakash Sastry and John Mallan, initially focused on building photo editing tools but later focused on artificial intelligence models for converting text into video.

Over the past two years, the Hotshot team has developed three models: Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot. These models open up new possibilities for education, entertainment, communications, and productivity. Following the acquisition, the company plans to scale its development on the Colossus cluster, which is the largest in the world.

The acquisition signals xAI's intention to develop its own video generation models to compete with players such as OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo 2. The future fate of the Hotshot team within xAI has not yet been disclosed.