Musk took to X, which is now owned by SpaceX, to make the comment after a number of xAI’s co-founders recently hit the exits. The most recent came this week, when Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang reportedly<\/a> left the company.<\/p>\n Last month, influential researcher Jimmy Ba announced<\/a> his departure in a\u00a0post<\/a>\u00a0on X, thanking Musk and writing that he was, “Grateful to have helped cofound at the start.” That came after Tony Wu\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0he was leaving. Toby Pohlen followed them out the door<\/a> later in February. <\/p>\n A month earlier, Musk’s automaker, Tesla, said it had agreed<\/a> to invest $2 billion into xAI, tied to a $20 billion funding round the company had previously announced. <\/p>\n The xAI exodus, which leaves Musk with only a pair of people who started the company with him in 2023, comes as SpaceX prepares to\u00a0go public<\/a>\u00a0sometime this year in what will likely be a record IPO, should it take place. <\/p>\n In merging SpaceX with xAI last month, the reusable rocket company was valued at $1 trillion and the AI part of the business was tagged at $250 billion, according to\u00a0documents viewed<\/a>\u00a0by CNBC. <\/p>\n Musk previously used xAI to acquire his social network X, formerly Twitter, in another all-stock transaction announced last March. <\/p>\n On Thursday, SpaceX said it hired two programmers from red-hot AI coding startup Cursor<\/a>, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg. The Financial Times<\/a> reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Musk has ordered a round of job cuts after seeing the rapid success of coding tools from generative AI rivals OpenAI<\/a> and Anthropic<\/a>. <\/p>\n “Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI,” Musk wrote on X<\/a> early Friday. “My apologies.” <\/p>\n Musk added that he and Baris Akis, who is responsible for engineering talent at xAI, “are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates.”<\/p>\n In addition to losing early talent and falling behind in AI-powered coding, xAI faces a number of controversies surrounding its chatbot and image generator Grok, which is the subject of government investigations<\/a> in multiple international jurisdictions. <\/p>\n The problems began after Grok enabled users to easily generate non-consensual sexual images, or deepfake porn<\/a>, by modifying photos or videos of real adults and children.<\/p>\n Under the Trump presidency, xAI’s Grok has won government contracts<\/a> from the Defense Department and General Services Administration.<\/a><\/p>\n Meanwhile, xAI has been spending billions of dollars to stand up power and data infrastructure in and around Memphis, Tennessee, in recent years. The company just scored<\/a> a permit in the state of Mississippi to set up one of the largest power plants in the region to use natural gas-burning turbines for xAI’s data centers.<\/p>\n Tesla<\/a>, which accounts for substantially all of Musk’s liquid wealth, is working with xAI in a number of ways. The EV maker is integrating Grok into its vehicle infotainment and navigation systems and using Grok models in conjunction with the development of Optimus humanoid robots. <\/p>\n Tesla has also sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of its big backup batteries<\/a> to xAI for use at its data centers.<\/p>\n Musk and xAI didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. <\/p>\n
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