Written by Joyce Nzomo
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has laid off at least 500 workers from its data annotation team, which trains the firm’s Grok chatbot, according to a report by Business Insider.
Employees were informed via email on Friday night that the company planned to downsize its team of generalist AI tutors, the report said, citing internal messages.
In response to media requests, xAI pointed to a post on X stating that it was actively hiring across various domains and aimed to expand its specialist AI tutor team by tenfold.
The data annotation division, xAI’s largest workforce, was responsible for teaching Grok to interpret and categorize raw data, Business Insider reported. Affected workers were told they would be paid through the end of their contracts or until November 30, though
access to company systems was cut off immediately.
The layoffs come weeks after xAI’s finance chief Mike Liberatore left the company in July after only a few months in the role, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Musk launched xAI in 2023 as a challenger to Big Tech’s AI firms, accusing rivals of excessive censorship and weak safety standards.
Courtesy of Reuters
