Aakash Sastry, CEO of Hotshot, posted on X announcing the acquisition of the platform by xAI.
The bold move was announced on March 17, 2025, highlighting xAI’s future ambitions to grow itself in the creative space.
Hotshot CEO and co-founder Aakash Sastry broke the news in a Monday X post that radiated excitement.
"Over the past 2 years, our small team built three video foundation models—Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “Training these beasts gave us a front-row seat to how AI is about to revolutionize global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity. Now, joining xAI, we’re ready to scale up on Colossus—the world’s largest compute cluster!"
Here’s the full post:
Founded in 2023, Hotshot’s original name was Natural Synthetics Inc. The startup joined the race of AI-generated images and then soon transitioned into a text-to-video space. Since then, plenty of big names have shown interest in investing in the company. Some of these names are Lachy Groom, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel.
As a result, Hotshot could secure significant growth even in a competitive landscape, ultimately making its way to large pockets of xAI.
So, What’s xAI Cooking by Acquiring Hotshot?
Well, Elon has not been discreet about his ambition to counter big names among AI video generators like Sora or Google’s Veo 2. Back in January, during a livestream, he teased a “Grok Video” model, promising a release “in a few months.”
It is still under wraps if Sastry, Mullan, and the full Hotshot crew will join xAI. For now, any official announcement around this is still pending.
What we know is from the official post:
Starting today, March 14, 2025, we will be sunsetting new video creation. Existing hotshotters will have until March 30, 2025, to download the videos they've created on the platform.
So, whether this collaboration is going to do wonders for xAI or not, we will keep a close eye on it.
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