Following the departure, only Manuel Croix – known as “Macro” – and Ross Nordeen will remain among the 11 co-founders who helped Musk establish xAI in San Francisco in March 2023.
Last month, Musk criticized the coding team for lagging in a town hall meeting posted online. He detailed the restructuring that followed the ouster of several other co-founders, including Greg Yang, Tony Wu and Jimmy Bae.
Former DeepMind researcher Toby Pohlen was put in charge of the “MacroHard” project to create a digital agent that Musk said could mimic entire software companies. Musk said it was the company’s “most important” campaign. The name is a “joking” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire said. Pohlen left after 16 days.
Musk has redeployed Ashok Eluswamy, head of AI software at Tesla, to restart the macro effort and review work previously done. Musk said Tesla and XAI will work together to develop a “digital Optimus” that will combine the car and robot maker’s real-world AI expertise and Grok’s larger language models.
Employees complain that the constant turmoil is destroying morale and preventing XAI from achieving its potential.
Musk has built a massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee, with more than 200,000 specialized AI chips, which he plans to expand to 1 million GPUs over time. It also benefits from data fed by their social media network X, which was merged into XAI last year and now promotes the Grok chatbot.
A memo sent to employees denying there would be mass layoffs on Wednesday, the people said. However, researchers continue to leave after becoming frustrated with Musk’s “extremely extreme” work demands or after receiving better offers from rivals, said several people familiar with the departures.
xAI has had to take on multiple roles due to layoffs and departures. The people said recruiters are often contacting candidates who have failed in previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs on better financial terms.
“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview at XAI. I’m sorry,” Musk posted Friday morning. He said he would “study the company’s interview history and reach out to promising candidates.”
Musk still has the ability to recruit Silicon Valley’s top talent. This week, XAI hired two employees from the popular AI coding app Cursor—Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg—to help improve its “Grok Code Fast” product.
“An orbital space station and mass launch vehicle on the Moon would be incredible,” Musk said in a post Thursday welcoming them.
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