Remember when Elon Musk hired a bunch of youngsters to gut the federal government? Well, now he's put one in charge of a key division at his company xAI.
Business Insider reports that the data annotation team that helps train the company's AI chatbot Grok is now being led by Diego Pasini, a college student who graduated from high school in 2023 — and who's been at the company for less than a year.
His promotion comes right off the back of a brutal round of layoffs at the team which saw more than 500 staffers, including high-level employees, get the axe.
Pasini, post-bloodbath, has quickly settled into his new role.
On September 15, he led an all-hands meeting where he told everyone who hadn't already gotten fired that there'd be no more layoffs, three employees told BI.
Shortly after the meeting, another group of more than 100 employees were fired.
The eyebrow raising promotion echoes how Musk empowered a handful of extremely young employees at DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency. One of them was 19-year-old Edward Coristine, also known by his online handle "Big Balls," who was reportedly fired from an old job for leaking company secrets, and ran a company that reportedly helped a notorious cybercrime ring. Another DOGE boy resigned — and then was rehired — after his incredibly racist tweets came to light.
Their young age and questionable backgrounds raised serious questions about Musk's hiring choices, especially since these young individuals were often being given unprecedented access to sensitive federal systems and data.
The stakes are probably lower at xAI, but not insignificant. Data annotation is a crucial step of training an AI model that often gets overlooked. All those mountains of text and images that an AI model devours can be meaningless unless an AI model knows what it's looking at. Data annotators manually go in and add that context.
And the AI model in question in this case is Grok, which is integrated into X-formerly-Twitter, where its users frequently summon the chatbot to explain current events. Grok has a history of wildly going off the rails, including espousing claims of "white genocide" in unrelated discussions, and in one of the most spectacular meltdowns in the AI industry, going around styling itself as "MechaHitler." Meanwhile, its creator Musk has repeatedly spoken about "fixing" Grok after instances of the AI citing sources that contradict his worldview.
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