After the departures, only Manuel Kroiss, known as “Macro,” and Ross Nordeen will remain of the 11 co-founders who helped Musk build xAI in San Francisco in March 2023.
Last month, Musk criticized the coding team for falling behind in a town hall meeting that was streamed online. He detailed the reorganization after the removal of several other co-founders, including Greg Yang, Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba.
Former DeepMind researcher Toby Pohlen led the “Macrohard” project to create digital agents that Musk said could replicate all software companies. Musk said it was the “most important” driver at the company. The billionaire added that the name was a “funny” reference to Microsoft. Pohlen left 16 days later.
Musk has reassigned Ashok Elluswamy, head of AI software at Tesla, to restart the Macrohard effort and review the 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 experience and Grok’s extensive language models.
Staff complain that the constant turmoil destroys morale and prevents xAI from reaching its potential.
Musk has built a massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee, with more than 200,000 specialized AI chips, and plans to grow it to 1 million GPUs over time. It also benefits from data provided by social media network X, which merged with xAI last year and now promotes the Grok chatbot.
Employees were sent a memo Wednesday denying there would be mass layoffs, the people said. However, researchers continue to quit after burnout from Musk’s “extremely strict” job requirements or after receiving better offers from competitors, multiple people familiar with the departures said.
Layoffs and departures have left xAI with multiple roles. Recruiters are contacting candidates who failed previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs with better financial terms, the people said.
“Many talented people have declined offers or interviews at xAI over the past few years. I’m sorry,” Musk wrote Friday morning. He said “the company will go through the interview date and contact prospective candidates.”
Musk still has the ability to hire Silicon Valley’s top talent. This week, xAI poached two employees — Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg — from Kursor, a popular artificial intelligence coding app, to help improve its “Grok Code Fast” product.
Musk welcomed them in a post on Thursday, adding: “Orbital space centers and mass drives on the Moon are going to be incredible.”
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