‘It wasn’t built the first time’ – Musk’s xAI is starting, again

And there were two: Of the 11 original co-founders who launched xAI with Elon Musk three years ago, only two remain as the deep learning lab continues to retool its workforce to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. That rebuild, insists Musk, is by design.

“xAI wasn’t built from scratch, it’s being rebuilt from the ground up,” Musk said he said on Thursday on his social media platform, X. In many ways, it’s not going well.

The most immediate pressure is the competition. This week, the co-founders of xAI, Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang left the outfit after Musk complained that the company’s AI tools did not compete well with Claude Code or Codex, software developers developed by Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Musk said the company held a hands-on meeting on Wednesday that focused on implementation, which he predicted could happen by the middle of this year.

Writing materials are very important because that’s where the money is. Although the number of users in the early years was driven by xAI’s command of Grok’s ability to generate sexual and offensive images, the writing tools were seen as a money-making technology for AI labs. This makes the xAI delay in this area more than a mental problem; it’s a business problem.

Staff restructuring continues this week. Last month, 11 senior engineers at xAI, including two co-founders, he left the company The following changes Musk described as restructuring to fit the big business. That effort was insufficient: The Financial Times report that SpaceX and Tesla executives went into the company to test employees and fire those who didn’t succeed.

The remaining two assistants, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, along with Musk, have their work cut out for them.

Musk is now casting a wider net for talent. On Thursday, he said on X that he is another student, Barry Akisthey are reviewing he turned down job offers in the company, with an eye to reach potential candidates who should have the opportunity to ask questions. “I’m sorry,” Musk added, addressing the crowd of guests he had insulted.

By comparison, LinkedIn says xAI has more than 5,000 employees, compared to more than 7,500 at OpenAI and more than 4,700 at Anthropic.

When it comes to hiring, there is one encouraging sign. Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg join xAI from AI coding tool company Cursor, where the two were jointly responsible for product development. Unlike xAI, Cursor relies on edge labs to find the AI ​​models it runs on. Their decision to join xAI may reflect the need for direct access to LLM and the use of computing to drive it – and show that the economy of xAI, its frontier model, is still attractive.

In any case, the compulsion to show results is internal. Now that xAI is part of SpaceX, and with the public offering of SpaceX shares expected, the investment heating unit is forced to present to Grok, his LLM. (The stumbling block of AI is not the story Musk needs investors to read.)

For a long time, Musk is betting on something bigger than writing instruments. Macrohard’s xAI project – Musk believes the name is “a joke about Microsoft” – aims to create an AI assistant capable of doing anything a white-collar person can do on a computer. Toby Pohlen, who was appointed to lead the project in February, left within weeks, and this week, Business Insider report that Macrohard was first.

Musk’s answer has been to hire some of his companies to do the work. He revealed for the first time that Macrohard is a joint venture with Tesla, which is also developing an assistant called “Digital Optimus” – a reference to Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot. In Musk to explainthe xAI language model would guide Tesla’s assistant while working.

It is a wish; it is no longer special. In fact, the vision is not far from what Perplexity – the AI-powered search engine – is doing with “Everything is Computer” offering, which aims to provide business users with dedicated “digital assistants” who can manage their digital operations. It is also similar to what entrepreneur Peter Steinberger is currently working on at OpenAI, after creating the famous OpenClaw.