Elon Musk-led xAI fires around 500 Grok AI trainers: Report

xAI has laid off close to 500 workers, a third of its data annotation team, according to reports.

A Business Insider exclusive stated that xAI, led by Elon Musk, notified employees via email on Friday that the company were cutting down its team of generalist AI tutors to focus on more specialist roles.

“After a thorough review of our Human Data efforts, we have decided to accelerate the expansion and prioritisation of our specialist AI tutors, while scaling back our focus on general AI tutor roles. This strategic pivot will take effect immediately,” one email viewed by BI read, “As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and your employment with xAI will conclude.”

The data annotation team is xAI’s largest team, the report further noted. This team is tasked with developing Elon Musk’s AI LLM, Grok, by teaching it how to process raw data. This includes contextualising and categorising it, among other things.

The report also highlighted how the Slack channel by the data annotation team reduced from more than 1,500 members on Friday afternoon to just above 1,000 members by evening local time.

On Saturday morning, xAI took to X, formerly Twitter, to post: “Specialist AI tutors at xAI are adding huge value. We will immediately surge our Specialist AI tutor team by 10x!”

“We are hiring across domains like STEM, finance, medicine, safety, and many more. Come join us to help build truth-seeking AGI!”

The reported layoffs came just days after certain senior employees had their Slack access revoked at xAI. Then on Friday morning (Thursday night local time), they asked certain employees to brace for reorganisation and gave them a series of tests.