Elon Musk's recently rebranded company SpaceXAI is losing top talent, with more than 50 researchers and engineers leaving since February. Among those leaving are key leaders in coding, world models, also known as world simulators, and Grok voice assistant.
Elon Musk's recently rebranded company SpaceXAI is losing top talent, with more than 50 researchers and engineers leaving since February. Among those leaving are key leaders in coding, world models, also known as world simulators, and Grok voice assistant.
According to The Information, companies like Meta and Thinking Machine Labs are bringing in former employees, and the company's core pre-training team has shrunk to just a few people.
At least 11 xAI employees have joined Meta since February. At least seven more have joined Mira Murati’s Thinking Machine Labs. We previously reported 11 layoffs from xAI that were announced immediately after the merger, including the departure of two co-founders.
SpaceX acquired xAI in February — both companies are owned by Musk — and has since put new management in place. Musk renamed the combined entity SpaceXAI earlier this month.
The layoffs from the pre-training team, which followed the departure of its leader, Juntan Zhuang, have caused particular concern among employees and people close to SpaceXAI, The Information reports. Pre-training is the first step in creating new AI models, so many have begun to question whether the company is still committed to developing advanced models.
It is also noted that the culture of "extreme work" introduced by Musk forced some staff to leave - this has previously been complained about by employees of other companies of his, including Tesla. A source in a conversation with The Information said that Musk set unrealistic deadlines for training models, which led to neglect of quality during the development of Grok.
Of course, the reason for several layoffs could simply have been a desire to convert their shares into cash, TechCrunch noted.
SpaceX regularly holds tenders so that employees can sell their vested shares privately. Others may simply be confident that their assets will soon become liquid, given the company’s high-profile IPO. Once employees see financial gain on the horizon, they are less likely to work for a company that puts undue pressure on them and may no longer be developing the cutting-edge designs they would like to work on.
