What’s behind the mass exodus at XAI?

The past few days have been a rough ride for xAI, which has been collecting employee and co-founder departure announcements left and right. On Tuesday and Wednesday, co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu Announce His departure and that “it’s time for the next chapter” with co-founder Jimmy Ba following up with Similar post Later that day, he wrote that it was time to “recalibrate his approach to the big picture.” The departures mean that xAI is now here to stay Only half Of its 12 original founders on staff. A number to Staff also They took to X to announce that they were leaving xAI, with some announcing that they would be founding their own AI companies.

Elon Musk’s AI Startup, Written by One merger/acquisition or lastunder the same umbrella as his space company, SpaceX, and his social media platform, X. Since the SpaceX merger was announced last week, rumors have swirled about what has been reported $1.25 trillion Overall evaluation and future plans of the company, which Musk Announce It will include “space-based AI” data centers and “the most ambitious and vertically integrated innovation engine on Earth (and beyond).” At an internal xAI meeting on Tuesday, Musk said It is said He talked about plans to build an artificial intelligence satellite factory and a city on the moon.

There’s often a natural starting point for companies after a merger, and that’s Musk Announce Some of the departures were reorganizations that “unfortunately required parting ways with some people.” But there are also signs that people don’t like the direction Musk has taken things.

One source spoke to him Edge About events inside the company, who left earlier this year and asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation, said many people at the company were disappointed by xAI’s focus on… NSFW Grok creations And disregard for safety. The source also felt that the company is “stuck in a catch-up phase” and is not doing anything new or radically different from its competitors. “Even though we were iterating very quickly, we could never get to a point like, ‘Oh, we made an incremental change to what OpenAI or Anthropic or the other companies had released,’” he said.

The SpaceX merger meant that xAI shareholders were released 250 billion dollars into new shares, so employees who own shares ostensibly have more scope to finance their own ideas. Former employee Wahid Kazemi books On Another former employee He said He left the company to “build something new focused on accelerating science.”

Another former employee said he was launching an AI infrastructure company called Nuraline along with other former XAI employees. he books“During my time at

Musk posted a registration From a 45-minute comprehensive xAI internal 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, Visualization (image and video), and Macrohard (which “aims to do full digital simulations of entire companies,” Musk said).

The source who left earlier this year said Grok’s shift toward NSFW content was due in part to ditching the safety team, with little of the safety review process remaining for models besides basic filters for things like CSAM. “Safety is a dead foundation at xAI,” he said. Looking at the restructured organizational chart that Elon Musk shared on X, there is no mention of the safety team. The source also said that he felt during his time at xAI that leadership had too many different opinions on which product features to prioritize and that infighting sometimes stalled progress. He said a lot of the decisions about what to ship are made via an all-company group chat on X with Musk participating in it.

A second source, who left XAI before the recent restructuring and requested anonymity, echoed ideas that Musk’s company was playing catch-up. “Trying to do what OpenAI was doing a year ago is not the way you can beat OpenAI,” he said. “It’s all catch-up. Almost no bet is risky. If something isn’t done before then, we won’t do it.”

He pointed to xAI’s lack of focus on safety as well, an issue that was also highlighted Report via The Washington Post Earlier this month.

The second source said: “There is absolutely no security at the company – not in the image (form), not in the chatbot.” “He (Musk) is actively trying to make the model more disruptive because safety means oversight, to some extent, for him.”

The second source also said that engineers at xAI are “immediately pushed into production” and that for a long time, there was no human review.

“You can survive by staying silent and doing what Elon wants,” he said.