Traders alike to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO are in talks to assistance xAI elevate $3 billion in a investment spherical that would worth it at $18 billion, sources told the Wall Street Journal, which stated Steve Jurvetson and venture-capital company Gigafund are a few of the potential backers.

Jurvetson is a pal of Musk’s who serves on SpaceX’s board and prior to now sat on Tesla’s board. In the meantime, Gigafund co-founder Luke Nosek may be on SpaceX’s board and is a part of the so-called “PayPal mafia” along side Musk, in step with the Magazine.

Representatives for xAI didn’t in an instant reply to Fortune‘s request for comment on Saturday and didn’t reply to the Magazine‘s request overdue Friday.

Musk began xAI latter week as a rival to ChatGPT dad or mum OpenAI, which he cofounded however then sued then claiming it used to be leaving behind its actual nonprofit challenge. In November, xAI introduced its personal chatbot named Grok and excused an up to date model latter while.

Information of the imaginable $3 billion fundraising spherical is the latest sign that xAI is looking for more capital future rival OpenAI has a $13 billion constancy from Microsoft and Anthropic has raised $6 billion, together with from backers Google and Amazon.

In January, the Financial Times reported that Musk used to be taking a look to lift as much as $6 billion for xAI, despite the fact that he then denied that he used to be fundraising. And in December, a regulatory submitting confirmed that xAI was seeking to raise $1 billion from buyers and had already connect just about $135 million.

On the similar presen that the race for investor backing is heating up in man made judgement, xAI and its rivals are also competing for AI talent. Upcoming information emerged on Wednesday that Tesla’s Ethan Knight changed into the carmaker’s fourth engineer to secured xAI, Musk tweeted that Knight had deliberate to infection to OpenAI.

“It was either xAI or them,” Musk wrote, noting he used to be additionally boosting the AI engineers’ pay. “[OpenAI has] been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and [has] unfortunately been successful in a few cases.”

He then added that “The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!”

Tech corporations are scrambling to fight for the limited pool of workers with high-level AI experience. In truth, there may well be just a couple hundred public on this planet with high-level {qualifications} in coaching immense language fashions and troubleshooting unutilized AI platforms, Naveen Rao, head of generative AI at Databricks, told the Wall Street Journal latter while.

The fee to draw and keep such in-demand abilities is lofty. Information from career-services platform Ranges.fyi presentations the median wage at OpenAI is $925,000, together with bonuses and corporate fairness.

Such sky-high repayment comes as a March report from McKinsey discovered that about 51% of gen AI creators and heavy users say they are planning to quit within the next three to six months, in comparison to 34% of staff total who say they plan shed inside of that very same presen length.

At Facebook dad or mum Meta, at least three high-level AI employees have departed in the past few weeks. That incorporates pc scientist and senior director of engineering Erik Meijer, who informed Fortune in an unique interview that he had declined “stellar offers” from a number of of the “most sought-out” AI corporations.

To secure such mind energy from leaping send, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even reportedly taken to wooing top AI engineers and researchers with non-public appeals.