According to an internal message viewed by Business Insider, Elon Musk AI startup Xai fired 500 team members on Friday night.
The emails reportedly announced an immediate “strategic pivot” that the company reportedly decided that “it accelerates the expansion and prioritization of our expert AI tutors and focuses on the role of AI tutors in general.”
“As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and we conclude your employment at Xai,” writes Xai.
According to Business Insider, these cuts represent about a third of Xai’s 1,500-person data annotation team. This is a team working on labeling and preparing the data used to train Xai’s chatbot Grok.
Contacted for confirmation, Xai pointed out a statement on the X-related statement (a social network owned by Musk, which was acquired earlier this year).
“We employ across domains like STEM, finance, medicine and safety,” the company said.
