xAI acquires Hotshot video generation company, Grok getting generative videos?

The company behind Grok AI, xAI has officially announced that it has acquired Hotshot, a text-to-video generation platform developed by HotShot Support. The amount of this deal is not announced in the public.

The company founder, Akash Sastry confirmed this acquisition with an X post. The platform is known for its high-quality, short-form videos up to 10 seconds from text prompts.

It uses large-scale diffusion transformer models to generate visually appealing videos in different styles, including comic book like animations, rotoscope effects and more for a realistic video.

Hotshot has developed different video foundation models including Hotshot-XL, Act One and Hotshot. The first model generates 1-second, 8fps videos, it was used for tech demos and became a foundation for successors.

The Act One and Hotshot are advanced models with improved reasoning and generation capability, especially the Hotshot model. Information suggests that Hotshot was trained on 600 million video clips using thousands of GPUs.

“Training these models has given us a look into how global education, entertainment, communication and productivity are about to change in the coming years. We’re excited to continue scaling these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as a part of xAI” wrote Akash on X.

hotshot xAI

The Hotspot team has a limited scale development base, which now has a massive computational power thanks to xAI’s Memphis data center with more than 200,000 H100 GPUs.

It also means that we may see a generative Video option coming to Grok chatbot.

Grok started its journey with text-to-text conversation in late 2023. Through last year, xAI has made various improvements to this chatbot including fast reasoning, improved response rate, larger tokens, web search result integration, image analysis and text-to-image picture generation.

However, adding generative videos would sweeten the deal for Grok users. For now, xAI has not announced plans for Hotspot.