According to internal communications seen by Business Insider, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI let go of 500 employees on Friday night.
The emails allegedly detailed a swift “strategic shift,” revealing that the company would “speed up the growth and focus on our expert AI tutors, while reducing emphasis on generalist AI tutor roles.”
“Due to this new direction, most generalist AI tutor roles are no longer required, and your employment at xAI will come to an end,” the company reportedly stated.
Business Insider reported that this layoff affects roughly one-third of xAI’s 1,500-member data annotation staff, who are responsible for preparing and labeling data to train xAI’s Grok chatbot.
When asked for comment, xAI referenced a post on X (the Musk-owned platform acquired earlier this year), stating that the company “will rapidly increase our Specialist AI tutor team by a factor of 10.”
The company also mentioned, “We are recruiting in fields such as STEM, finance, healthcare, safety, and many others.”
