The past few days have been a wild ride for xAI, which is racking up staff and cofounder departure announcements left and right. On Tuesday and Wednesday, cofounder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced his departure and that it was “time for [his] next chapter,” with cofounder Jimmy Ba following with a similar post later that day, writing that it was “time to recalibrate [his] gradient on the big picture.” The departures mean that xAI is now left with only half of its original 12 cofounders on staff. A number of staffers also took to X to announce they were leaving xAI, with some announcing that they were starting their own AI companies.
Elon Musk’s AI startup, by one merger / acquisition or another, is under the same umbrella as both his space company, SpaceX, and his social media platform, X. Since the SpaceX merger was announced last week, rumors have swirled about the reported $1.25 trillion valuation and the all-in-one company’s future plans, which Musk announced would involve “space-based AI” data centers and “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.” In an internal meeting at xAI on Tuesday, Musk reportedly talked of plans to build an AI satellite factory and city on the Moon.
There’s often a natural departure point for companies post-merger, and Musk has announced that some of the departures were a reorganization that “unfortunately required parting ways with some people.” But there are also signs that people don’t like the direction Musk has taken things.
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One source who spoke with The Verge about the happenings inside the company, who left earlier this year and requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said that many people at the company were disillusioned by xAI’s focus on NSFW Grok creations and disregard for safety. The source also felt like the company was “stuck in the catch-up phase” and not doing anything new or fundamentally different from its competitors. “Although we were iterating really fast, we were never able to get to a point like, ‘Oh, we’ve made a step function change over what OpenAI or Anthropic or other companies had released,’” he said.
The SpaceX merger meant that xAI shareholders were reportedly issued $250 billion in new shares, so employees with equity ostensibly have more runway to fund their own ideas. One former employee, Vahid Kazemi, wrote on X that “all AI labs are building the exact same thing, and it’s boring. I think there’s room for more creativity. So, I’m starting something new.” Another former staffer said he left the company to “build something new, focused on accelerating science.”
Yet another former employee said he was launching an AI infrastructure company called Nuraline alongside other ex-xAI employees. He wrote, “During my time at xAI, I got to see a clear path towards hill climbing any problem that can be defined in a measurable way. At the same time, I’ve seen how raw intelligence can get lobotomized by the finest human errors … Learning shouldn’t stop at the model weights, but continue to improve every part of an AI system.”
“Safety is a dead org at xAI.”
Musk posted a recording of xAI’s 45-minute internal all-hands meeting that announced the changes, adding that xAI will be categorized into four main areas: Grok Main and Voice (the main Grok AI model), Coding, Imagine (image and video), and Macrohard (“which is intended to do full digital emulation of entire companies,” Musk said).
The source who departed earlier this year said Grok’s turn toward NSFW content was due partly to the safety team being let go, with little to no remaining safety review process for the models besides basic filters for things like CSAM. “Safety is a dead org at xAI,” he said. Looking at the restructured org chart Elon Musk shared on X, there’s no mention of a safety team. The source also said that during his time at xAI, he felt leadership had a lot of differing opinions on which product features to prioritize and that infighting sometimes stalled progress. A lot of decisions on what to ship happen via an all-company group chat on X with Musk in it, he said.
A second source, who departed xAI before the recent restructuring and requested anonymity, echoed the thoughts that Musk’s company was playing catch-up. “Trying to do what OpenAI was doing a year ago is not how you beat OpenAI,” he said. “Everything is a catch-up. There’s almost zero risky bet. If something hasn’t been done before we’re not going to do it.”
He mentioned xAI’s lack of safety focus too, an issue that was also highlighted in reporting by The Washington Post earlier this month.
“There is zero safety whatsoever in the company — not in the image [model], not in the chatbot,” the second source said. “He [Musk] actively is trying to make the model more unhinged because safety means censorship, in a sense, to him.”
The second source also said engineers at xAI immediately “push to prod[uction]” and that for a long time, there was no human review involved.
“You survive by shutting up and doing what Elon wants,” he said.
