Elon Musk’s xAI has acquired generative video startup Hotshot to bring motion imaging to Grok 3. Released in February, Grok 3 adds Deep Search and Thinking and improved on its predecessor’s still imaging capabilities, but lacks generative video, a much-requested feature — one that could make Grok a freestanding competitor to OpenAI’s individual offerings: ChatGPT for text, Sora for video, and DALL-E for images. “Cool AI video coming soon!” was Musk’s comment to Hotshot’s acquisition announcement on the networking platform. Hotshot can generate clips of up to 10-seconds at 1280×720 pixels.

Hotshot is the product of a company officially known as Natural Synthetics Inc., which launched the unit in 2023 with “an AI-powered image generation and editing tool,” according to SiliconANGLE. The company pivoted to video generation, debuting Hotshot in August 2024.

The model was trained on a dataset of approximately 600 million clips. During development, the company integrated a second neural network that automatically generates captions. “Captions make it easier for AI models to understand videos, which in turn streamlines the training workflow,” SiliconANGLE adds.

In a post on X touting the new ownership, Hotshot co-founder and CEO Aakash Sastry said he looks forward to continuing the model’s training using xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, housed in a 750,000-square-foot Memphis, Tennessee facility.

The San Francisco-based Hotshot began as a partnership between Sastry and CTO John Mullan, who co-founded Natural Synthetics in 2017.

Hotshot was reportedly trained for four months “using several thousand of Nvidia Corp.’s A100 graphics processing units,” which SiliconANGLE contrasts against “the 200,000 Nvidia chips xAI has installed in Colossus,” still in the process of expanding.

XAI “hopes to boost Colossus’ graphics card count to 1 million by year’s end” and “has reportedly held talks with Dell Technologies Inc. about buying more than $5 billion worth of AI servers” as part of that effort, SiliconANGLE reports.

The Hotshot website now informs users that on March 14 it began “sunsetting new video creation” with a deadline of March 30 to download clips created on the platform.

TechCrunch reports that it isn’t “immediately clear” how much of Hotshot’s team (believed to be between 10 and 20 people) will join the move to xAI, but speculates that xAI may wind up creating a dedicated video generator, like Sora and Midjourney, in addition to adding the capability to Grok.