Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup XAI has laid off 500 employees from its data annotation team, which helps train its grok chatbots.
The layoffs were previously reported by Business Insider.
The AI company told employees in an email that it plans to reduce its team of generalist AI instructors, according to reports reviewed by the publication. The company said the “strategic shift” means prioritizing specialist AI instructors while reducing its focus on generalist AI instructor roles.
In response to the story, Ksai directed journalists to a post by X, in which the company announced plans to expand its team of specialist AI trainers by “10X” and plans to open up roles on its careers page.
Xai’s team of human data annotators plays a key role in teaching Grok to understand the world by labeling, contextualizing, and classifying raw data used to train the chatbot. The XAI email said the laid-off employees will be paid until the end of their contracts or November 30, but their access to the company’s systems will be terminated on the day of the layoff notice.
Before the layoffs, XAI’s data annotation team was one of the largest, with 1,500 full-time and contract staff members, including AI trainers. The reorganization of the data annotation team comes amid a leadership shakeup at the team, which last week reported nine employees leaving the firm.
In a sign of the changing approach to training GROK, Xai on Thursday asked some AI trainers to prepare for tests, Business Inside reported on Grok’s “personality and model behavior” and DoomScrollers.
Musk launched XAI in 2023 to compete with Openai and Google Deepmind, which are competing to win the AI race. He pitched Grok as a safe and sound alternative to what he accused his competitors of building, “woke” chatbots that tended towards censorship.
