Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup developing artificial intelligence tools for video generation, similar to OpenAI’s Sora.

Some news – We're excited to announce that @HotshotSupport has been acquired by @xAI 🚀

Over the past 2 years we've built 3 video foundation models as a small team – Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot.

Training these models has given us a look into how global education,… pic.twitter.com/W4rmYUxnMR
— Aakash (@aakashsastry) March 17, 2025

Over the past two years, Hotshot has developed three video models: Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot, according to the company’s CEO, Akash Sastry.

“Training these neural networks has allowed us to understand how global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity will evolve in the coming years. We are excited to scale our efforts on the world’s largest cluster, Colossus, as part of xAI,” he said.

Elon Musk noted that a “cool video AI” is coming soon. The acquisition of Hotshot suggests xAI’s ambition to develop its own video generation models to compete with Sora, Google’s Veo 2, and other similar solutions. In January, Musk stated that he expects the Grok Video model to be released “within a few months.”

San Francisco-based Hotshot was founded several years ago. Initially, the startup focused on AI-powered photo creation and editing tools but later shifted toward text-to-video models.

Reminder: In February, xAI unveiled the third version of Grok, featuring enhanced capabilities, including image generation and internet data analysis.