While the major tech firm layoff season seems to be edging to an end, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stepped into controversy once again. Musk, who is also involved with SpaceX and Neuralink, had asked his staff at xAI to justify their jobs in a comprehensive report at all costs. What’s even more controversial is the limited 48-hour deadline, which has created an air of uncertainty in the company that takes care of the Grok chatbot.
According to the mandate, which was obtained via a leaked internal communication memo, the deadline was set for noon on a Thursday, following an email sent out on Tuesday. Weirdly, there has been no update from Musk or xAI in the hours following the deadline.
Musk asked xAI staff to justify their job
Musk’s directive required each employee to produce a single-page document. This report was expected to outline their accomplishments over the previous four weeks and explain their specific goals for the month. The strict timeline along with a focus on numbers, has been seen previously at companies like X (formerly Twitter) as part of Musk’s management tactics.
However, this latest mandate from Musk comes at a time when xAI recently underwent a significant restructuring, which included the layoff of over 500 members from its data annotation team. This group was crucial to the development and training of xAI’s Grok AI chatbot.
The decision to lay off people from these departments while simultaneously demanding performance reports from the remaining staff hints at Musk’s plans to ensure a smaller and more focused workforce. The directive has raised questions about the employees’ job security and the future of the company.
xAI doubling down on AI training
While Musk focuses on restructuring the team at xAI, the company has also been hiring new specialised AI tutors. These new roles are crucial for refining the AI’s capabilities and are being offered with a substantial increase in pay. At a time when rivals like Google and OpenAI have been actively hiring AI trainers, xAI doesn’t want to be seen far behind in the AI race.
What remains to be seen is whether more layoffs follow at xAI and how these layoffs affect the future of Musk’s AI company.
