Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI cut a large portion of its generalist AI tutor workforce

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI reportedly cut at least 500 people from its data-annotation ranks on Friday ￰0￱ company informed its staff by email that the company is shrinking its group of generalist AI tutors and shifting resources to ￰1￱ internal note, reviewed by Business Insider said “After a thorough review of our Human Data efforts, we’ve decided to accelerate the expansion and prioritization of our specialist AI tutors, while scaling back our focus on general AI tutor ￰2￱ strategic pivot will take effect ￰3￱ part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and your employment with xAI will conclude.” Employees were told they would continue to be paid through the end of their contract or through November ￰4￱ their access to company systems would end the same day they received the ￰5￱ Slack channel shrinks by 500 Annotators make up xAI’s largest unit and help train Grok by labeling and organizing raw information so the chatbot can read context and ￰6￱ main Slack channel for these workers had more than 1,500 members on Friday ￰7￱ Friday evening, that count had dropped to a little over 1,000 and kept falling as the reporting ￰8￱ Friday, xAI posted on X that it is hiring and plans to expand its cohort of specialist AI tutors by “10X.” The layoff emails arrived only days after several senior staffers, including the former head of the annotation team, saw their Slack access ￰9￱ the following days, employees were called into one-on-one meetings to walk through duties, recent work, and accomplishments, nine workers ￰10￱ were also asked to flag colleagues whose efforts they wanted to ￰11￱ new team leader demanded overnight tests By Thursday night, xAI told the annotation group to brace for a reorganization.

A team-wide message asked some employees to halt other work and complete a set of tests meant to help define their positions going forward, with a deadline of Friday morning Pacific time. A screenshot said the tests would sort annotators and their supervisors by strengths and ￰12￱ testing notice was posted by Diego Pasini, whom ten workers said had recently taken charge of the ￰13￱ asked staff to finish at least one test by the next ￰14￱ topics covered standard fields such as STEM, coding, finance, and medicine, as well as more idiosyncratic areas tied to Grok’s behavior , including “personality and model behavior” and “shitposters and doomscrollers.” The company also listed assessments for safety work, including “red teaming” the bot, and for tasks involving audio and ￰15￱ to his LinkedIn profile, Pasini joined xAI in January and is “on leave” from undergraduate studies at the Wharton School of the University of ￰16￱ and an xAI representative did not immediately respond to a request for ￰17￱ of xAI employees confused by sudden testing orders The Thursday announcement said the tests targeted supervisors and generalist ￰18￱ organizes staff into specialty tracks for STEM, coding, finance, legal, and media, alongside a large pool of generalists who handle many kinds of assignments, from writing to labeling audio and ￰19￱ than 200 employees reacted to Pasini’s post with a green check-mark emoji, and over 100 replied with questions or ￰20￱ worker, frustrated by the tight turnaround, wrote “Doing this after people have gone home for the day is pretty shady,” a message shown in a ￰21￱ employees said that worker’s Slack account was deactivated shortly ￰22￱ smartest crypto minds already read our ￰23￱ in?

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