Void of tech talent at Elon Musk’s xAI
Elon Musk’s AI start-up, xAI, is going through a period of turmoil with several members of the technical team already resigning. The exit of co-founders Jimmy Ba, a co-founder who led research, security and business operations, and Tony Wu, who led the reasoning team mean that five of the 12 original founders have left.
In recent weeks, several researchers have also left, further thinning xAI’s already small technical team. Some employees have raised concerns about Musk’s overly high expectations and unreasonable demands. The pressure increased after Musk’s decision to merge xAI with SpaceX, with the aim of creating a giant $1.5 trillion (around €1.3 trillion) entity.
This has caused internal turmoil. Public criticism of generating explicit content using xAI’s models, combined with Musk’s high expectations, has added to the pressure. XAI’s coding project, MacroHard, which was intended to compete with tools such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, has failed to live up to Musk’s ambitious goals.
Musk recognises the performance problems within xAI and has therefore restructured departments and overhauled leadership. Manuel Kroiss, a co-founder with experience at Google DeepMind, has been promoted to oversee coding activities.
The merger with SpaceX is driven by Musk’s desire to deploy advanced AI models from space using a network of data centre satellites. It also addresses xAI’s significant capital needs for chips, power and data centres.
The integration puts additional pressure on xAI’s team, however, as Musk pursues an IPO as early as June. Grok has come under fire worldwide for generating sexual AI images without permission. Last summer, this led to changes to the chatbot. Earlier, Grok had generated controversial content making anti-Semitic remarks.
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