Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has entered another round of layoffs after trimming the team by roughly fifteen percent in February. The billionaire is unhappy with xAI’s coding products, that has nudged him to go for cost-cutting measures including laying-off staff members, including those on senior roles, Financial Times reported on Friday.
While Musk did not confirm the layoffs on public channels, he did post on X that, “xAI was not built right first time around, so is bing rebuilt from the foundations up,” on Friday.
Guadong Zhang, who was part of xAI’s Grok team and had run the pre-training phase of the chatbot, is among those exiting the xAI team. As per Financial Times, Zhang informed his colleagues of being accused for certain issues with the coding following which Musk terminated him from the company. Zhang confirmed the end of his run from xAI on Friday.
This is the second round of firings at xAI after Musk trimmed the in February, right after his space firm SpaceX acquired xAI internally. Musk is reportedly planning a mega IPO for the merged entity later this year, eyeing a valuation of a whopping $1.25 trillion.
More details on the IPO being planned and a timeline under which it is expected to be finalized by remain undisclosed for now.
The FT report, did however claim, that of the 11 co-founders who were part of xAI’s setting up, only two remain after the layoffs. These two are Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen.
While Musk’s confirmation on the lay-offs remain awaited, the chief of X has posted that xAI is reviewing job applications of “talented people” who were denied interviews with the company in the past.
It is noteworthy that Musk’s aggressive firing from xAI’s coding division has stirred speculations if Grok is taking over the programming tasks at the AI startup. Recently, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that 50 percent of the exchange’s internal coding work has already been allocated to AI.
Source: X/ @MaranDefi
Musk has not addressed these speculations as yet.