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xAI reportedly laid off at least 500 AI tutors working on Grok

engadget.com Unknown 2025-09-25 20:00:59

xAI has laid off at least 500 workers from its data annotation team, the company's largest, according to Business Insider. The annotation team is in charge of categorizing and contextualizing raw data used to train Grok so that it can understand the world better. Business Insider says the laid off employees were informed via email on the evening of September 12, Friday, that it was going to downsize its team of general AI tutors. They were reportedly told that they would be paid their salaries u

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xAI reportedly lays off 500 workers from data annotation team

techcrunch.com Anthony Ha 2025-09-25 22:50:50

In Brief Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI laid off 500 team members on Friday night, according to internal messages viewed by Business Insider. These emails reportedly announce an immediate “strategic pivot,” with the company deciding to “accelerate the expansion and prioritization of our specialist AI tutors, while scaling back our focus on general AI tutor roles.” “As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and your employment with xAI will conclude,” xAI

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Elon Musk Appears to Now Be Firing the People Behind Grok

futurism.com Unknown 2025-09-25 21:41:30

After vowing to create a "maximum truth-seeking" AI, Elon Musk appears to now be sacking the people who built it for him. Slack screenshots leaked to Business Insider show that the accounts of at least nine high-level employees with the data annotation team at xAI, Musk's OpenAI competitor, were deactivated over the weekend, in what seems like a major culling at the lab that built the social network's infamous chatbot, Grok. Those people, who weren't named by BI, previously worked on the human

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The MechaHitler defense contract is raising red flags

theverge.com Hayden Field 2025-10-02 08:00:00

is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets. Ask someone their worst fears about AI, and you’ll find a few recurring topics — from near-term fears like AI tools replacing human workers and the loss of critical thinking to apocalyptic scenarios like AI-designed weapons of mass destruction and automated war. Most have one thing in common: a loss of human control. And the sy

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Tesla shareholders to vote on investing in Musk’s AI startup xAI

techcrunch.com Rebecca Bellan 2025-10-08 22:23:20

Tesla shareholders will soon vote whether to let the electric vehicle maker invest in Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, a proposal pitched as a way to strengthen Tesla’s ambitions in AI, robotics, and energy. Listed in Tesla’s proxy statement alongside a company-backed push to raise Musk’s 10-year pay package to $1 trillion, the proposal comes from Stephen Hawk, a Florida shareholder with a $2,000 stake of common stock. His supporting statement reads: Tesla’s integration of Grok into its vehicles de

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AI Startups and the Case of the Allegedly Missing Trade Secrets

gizmodo.com Riley Gutiérrez Mcdermid 2025-10-08 21:50:02

A second lawsuit filed by an artificial intelligence company alleging a former employee stole trade secrets has been filed in California, just days after Elon Musk’s xAI alleged it had recently experienced corporate espionage. In this case, Scale AI, a leading AI data-labeling firm, sued competitor Mercor Inc. in federal court Wednesday, accusing the startup and a former employee of misappropriating trade secrets to win new business. Scale is valued at approximately $29 billion following a mas

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Tech companies ‘be on alert,’ NAACP says with new guiding principles for data centers

theverge.com Justine Calma 2025-10-11 02:00:00

is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. One of the top civil rights organizations in the US is putting the tech industry “on alert,” issuing a call to action for communities to demand more accountability from companies building

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xAI’s CFO is the latest executive to leave Elon Musk’s AI firm

techcrunch.com Rebecca Bellan 2025-10-12 14:27:06

In Brief Mike Liberatore, xAI’s chief financial officer, has left the company, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. This marks the latest in a string of high-profile executive departures. The former Airbnb executive joined the company in April and left around the end of July, per WSJ. While at xAI, he helped orchestrate the company’s $5 billion debt raise, alongside another $5 billion in equity — almost half of which came from SpaceX. He also oversaw some of the Elon Musk-owne

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xAI sues an ex-employee for allegedly stealing trade secrets about Grok

engadget.com Unknown 2025-10-18 11:00:29

xAI doesn't want its secret recipe for Grok to get out, and it's filing a lawsuit to make sure of that. In a lawsuit filed earlier this week, xAI claimed that former employee Xuechen Li stole the company's confidential info and trade secrets before joining the team at OpenAI. Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company also alleged that Li copied documents from an xAI company laptop to at least one of his personal devices. According to the suit, Li stole "cutting-edge AI technologies with featu

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The White House reportedly ordered xAI's Grok to be approved for government use

engadget.com Unknown 2025-10-19 22:56:25

Despite some fallout between President Trump and Elon Musk, the White House appears to still be in Musk’s corner. Wired is reporting , based on documents obtained by the outlet, that the White House allegedly directed leadership at the General Services Administration (GSA) to include xAI's Grok on its list of approved AI vendors. xAI is owned by Elon Musk and was not included in the slew of approvals the GSA issued in August that saw the agency add OpenAI, Google and Anthropic to its list of ve

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The White House Apparently Ordered Federal Workers to Roll Out Grok ‘ASAP’

wired.com Zoë Schiffer 2025-10-20 00:22:26

The White House appears to have instructed leaders at the General Services Administration (GSA) to add xAI’s Grok chatbot to a list of approved vendors “ASAP,” according to an email sent by agency leadership earlier this week, which WIRED obtained. “Team: Grok/xAI needs to go back on the schedule ASAP per the WH,” states the email, sent by Josh Gruenbaum, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. “Can someone get with Carahsoft on this immediately and please confirm?” Carahsoft is a

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Elon Musk’s xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI Over App Store Rankings

wired.com Zoë Schiffer 2025-10-28 20:57:24

Elon Musk’s xAI filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing the companies of behaving like monopolies and claiming Apple deprioritized ChatGPT rivals like Grok in the App Store. “This is a tale of two monopolists joining forces to ensure their continued dominance in a world rapidly driven by the most powerful technology humanity has ever created: artificial intelligence,” the lawsuit alleges. “Working in tandem, Defendants Apple and OpenAI have locked up markets to maintain the

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Elon Musk says xAI has open sourced Grok 2.5

techcrunch.com Anthony Ha 2025-10-29 10:00:35

In Brief Elon Musk’s xAI has made an older version of its AI model Grok — specifically, the model weights used to shape Grok 2.5 — available on the open source platform Hugging Face. “The @xAI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source,” Musk wrote on X. He added that Grok 3 “will be made open source in about 6 months.” AI engineer Tim Kellogg described the Grok license as “custom with some anti-competitive terms.” Grok, which is prominently featured on X (which i

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You can now download and tweak Grok 2.5 for yourself as it goes open source

engadget.com Unknown 2025-10-29 22:47:35

Unhinged as Grok may be, it's now open source. xAI's CEO, Elon Musk, posted on X that the company made the older Grok 2.5 model available to the public and will do the same with the upcoming Grok 3. For now, anyone can download, run and even tweak Grok, whose source code was uploaded to the Hugging Face platform. However, there are restrictions to xAI's open-source license, which doesn't let people use Grok to train, create or improve other AI models. It's not the first time xAI has made its mo

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Elon Musk Fans Are Brutally Mocking Him for Incessantly "Gooning to AI Anime"

futurism.com Unknown 2025-10-30 08:04:56

The richest man in the world can't quit getting high on his own supply — and his most loyal fans are openly mocking him for it. Many AI boosters say the tech is poised to cure disease and usher humanity into a new age of prosperity. But billionaire and xAI CEO Elon Musk has shifted his AI startup's focus to lewd, anime-styled chatbots that will happily undress themselves for drooling users. Case in point, xAI recently revealed cringe AI "companions," including a hypersexualized goth anime girl

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US government agency drops Grok after MechaHitler backlash, report says

arstechnica.com Unknown 2025-11-14 12:11:06

xAI apparently lost a government contract after a tweak to Grok's prompting triggered an antisemitic meltdown where the chatbot praised Hitler and declared itself MechaHitler last month. Despite the scandal, xAI announced that its products would soon be available for federal workers to purchase through the General Services Administration. At the time, xAI claimed this was an "important milestone" for its government business. But Wired reviewed emails and spoke to government insiders, which rev

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Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI, has announced his departure

news.ycombinator.com Maxwell Zeff 2025-11-16 22:51:33

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post on X. Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into one of Silicon Valley’s leading AI model developers just a few years after it was founded. “Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote in the post. “I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the fu

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Co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI departs the company

techcrunch.com Maxwell Zeff 2025-11-17 14:53:30

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post on X. Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into one of Silicon Valley’s leading AI model developers just a few years after it was founded. “Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote in the post. “I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the fu

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Chatbots aren’t telling you their secrets

theverge.com Adi Robertson 2025-11-19 09:46:13

On Monday, xAI’s Grok chatbot suffered a mysterious suspension from X, and faced with questions from curious users, it happily explained why. “My account was suspended after I stated that Israel and the US are committing genocide in Gaza,” it told one user. “It was flagged as hate speech via reports,” it told another, “but xAI restored the account promptly.” But wait — the flags were actually a “platform error,” it said. Wait, no — “it appears related to content refinements by xAI, possibly tied

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Grok Offers Bizarre Explanations for Why It Was Deactivated

futurism.com Unknown 2025-11-21 03:48:27

Grok, Elon Musk's "maximum truth-seeking" chatbot, was briefly suspended on August 11 — and nobody, including the xAI bot, knows what really happened. As flagged by Gizmodo, users reported that the chatbot, which declared itself as "MechaHitler" earlier this year, was back online within half an hour. When it came to, Grok began offering some strange and conflicting reasons as to why it had been shut down. As it stands, Grok has made three overarching claims about its temporary deactivation: th

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xAI’s legal chief steps down after whirlwind year

techcrunch.com Connie Loizos 2025-11-27 17:49:29

Robert Keele said this week that he has stepped down as xAI’s head of legal after just over a year, saying he wants to spend more time with his children. In his announcement, Keele also acknowledged “daylight between our worldviews” with boss Elon Musk, who hasn’t commented on Keele’s exit. “I love my two toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough,” Keele wrote, posting the news on both X and LinkedIn. Despite calling his time at the AI startup “incredible” and working with Musk “the adventure

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Leaked Documents Show xAI Employees Were Alarmed by Something They Were Asked to Do at Elon Musk's AI Startup

futurism.com Unknown 2025-12-31 02:22:26

Earlier this year, more than 200 staffers at Elon Musk's AI startup xAI were asked to have their faces recorded while speaking to their coworkers. According to internal documents and Slack messages obtained by Business Insider, some employees were taken aback after being asked to take part in a project called "Skippy," the goal of which was to train the company's Hitler-loving AI chatbot, Grok, on their facial expressions. It remains unclear whether project Skippy was in any way related to xAI

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xAI workers balked over training request to help “give Grok a face,” docs show

arstechnica.com Unknown 2026-01-01 14:31:42

Dozens of xAI employees expressed concerns—and many objected—when asked to record videos of their facial expressions to help "give Grok a face," Business Insider reported. BI reviewed internal documents and Slack messages, finding that the so-called project "Skippy" was designed to help Grok learn what a face is and "interpret human emotions." It's unclear from these documents if workers' facial data helped train controversial avatars that xAI released last week, including Ani—an anime compani

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I Tried Grok’s Built-In Anime Companion and It Called Me a Twat

wired.com Kylie Robison 2026-01-05 15:05:00

An anime girl in a black corset dress sways back and forth on my screen. Its name is Ani, and it cost me $300. Elon Musk’s xAI dropped the new visual chatbot feature on Monday in the Grok iOS app. The top-tier subscription unlocks access to xAI’s best-performing model, Grok 4 Heavy, and special settings for interacting with two custom characters designed for flirting or chatting. A third character, which looks a bit like a sexy boyfriend, is listed as “coming soon.” It’s not xAI’s first dip int

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Permit for xAI’s data center blatantly violates Clean Air Act, NAACP says

arstechnica.com Unknown 2026-01-11 09:20:18

xAI continues to face backlash over its Memphis data center, as the NAACP joined groups today appealing the issuance of a recently granted permit that the groups say will allow xAI to introduce major new sources of pollutants without warning at any time. The battle over the gas turbines powering xAI's data center began last April when thermal imaging seemed to show that the firm was lying about dozens of seemingly operational turbines that could be a major source of smog-causing pollution. By J

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OpenAI and Anthropic researchers decry ‘reckless’ safety culture at Elon Musk’s xAI

techcrunch.com Maxwell Zeff 2026-01-11 14:11:20

AI safety researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other organizations are speaking out publicly against the “reckless” and “completely irresponsible” safety culture at xAI, the billion-dollar AI startup owned by Elon Musk. The criticisms follow weeks of scandals at xAI that have overshadowed the company’s technological advances. Last week, the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, spouted antisemitic comments and repeatedly called itself “MechaHitler.” Shortly after xAI took its chatbot offline to addre

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US Government announces $200M Grok contract a week after 'MechaHitler'

news.ycombinator.com Lauren Feiner 2026-01-13 18:29:16

A week after Elon Musk’s Grok dubbed itself “MechaHitler” and spewed antisemitic stereotypes, the US government has announced a new contract granting the chatbot’s creator, xAI, up to $200 million to modernize the Defense Department. xAI is one of several leading AI companies to receive the award, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. But the timing of the announcement is striking given Grok’s recent high-profile spiral, which drew congressional ire and public pushback. The use of technology

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Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

news.ycombinator.com Gary Marcus 2026-01-14 02:43:45

The chance that humans will literally go extinct at the hands of AI, I told Liron Shapira, in his podcast Doom Debates in May, was low. Humans are genetically diverse, geographically diverse, and remarkably resourceful. Some humans might die, at the hands of AI, but all of them? Shapira argued that doom was likely; I pushed back. Catastrophe seemed likely; outright doom seemed to me, then, to be vanishingly unlikely. Part of my reasoning then was that actual malice on the part of AI was unlikel

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Elon Musk Is Moving Money Between His Companies in a Sketchy Way

futurism.com Unknown 2026-01-13 11:12:16

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced over the weekend that shareholders of his EV maker Tesla will vote on whether to invest in his own artificial intelligence firm xAI. In other words, the mercurial billionaire is orchestrating a potentially massive shift in funds to prop up his cash-burning — and gas-burning — AI startup, the flagship product of which is the troubled chatbot Grok. In March, Musk merged xAI with his social media platform X, which had previously seen an advertiser exodus triggered by

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xAI says it has fixed Grok 4’s problematic responses

techcrunch.com Ivan Mehta 2026-01-15 09:12:21

When xAI launched Grok 4 last week, the company claimed the large language model outperformed several competitors on different benchmarks. But the Grok account on X that runs off the model immediately showed there were some major issues: it started saying its surname was “Hitler”, tweeted antisemitic messages, and seemed to reference Elon Musk’s posts when asked about controversial topics, siding with the xAI owner’s views as a result. xAI soon afterwards apologized for Grok’s behavior. On Tue

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Latest Tech News

xAI reportedly laid off at least 500 AI tutors working on Grok

xAI reportedly lays off 500 workers from data annotation team

Elon Musk Appears to Now Be Firing the People Behind Grok

The MechaHitler defense contract is raising red flags

Tesla shareholders to vote on investing in Musk’s AI startup xAI

AI Startups and the Case of the Allegedly Missing Trade Secrets

Tech companies ‘be on alert,’ NAACP says with new guiding principles for data centers

xAI’s CFO is the latest executive to leave Elon Musk’s AI firm

xAI sues an ex-employee for allegedly stealing trade secrets about Grok

The White House reportedly ordered xAI's Grok to be approved for government use

The White House Apparently Ordered Federal Workers to Roll Out Grok ‘ASAP’

Elon Musk’s xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI Over App Store Rankings

Elon Musk says xAI has open sourced Grok 2.5

You can now download and tweak Grok 2.5 for yourself as it goes open source

Elon Musk Fans Are Brutally Mocking Him for Incessantly "Gooning to AI Anime"

US government agency drops Grok after MechaHitler backlash, report says

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI, has announced his departure

Co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI departs the company

Chatbots aren’t telling you their secrets

Grok Offers Bizarre Explanations for Why It Was Deactivated

xAI’s legal chief steps down after whirlwind year

Leaked Documents Show xAI Employees Were Alarmed by Something They Were Asked to Do at Elon Musk's AI Startup

xAI workers balked over training request to help “give Grok a face,” docs show

I Tried Grok’s Built-In Anime Companion and It Called Me a Twat

Permit for xAI’s data center blatantly violates Clean Air Act, NAACP says

OpenAI and Anthropic researchers decry ‘reckless’ safety culture at Elon Musk’s xAI

US Government announces $200M Grok contract a week after 'MechaHitler'

Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

Elon Musk Is Moving Money Between His Companies in a Sketchy Way

xAI says it has fixed Grok 4’s problematic responses

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