Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI has reportedly laid off around 500 employees from its data annotation team, which helps train the company’s Grok chatbot, Business Insider reported on Friday.According to the report, staff were informed by email late on Friday that the company was downsizing its group of generalist AI tutors. The data annotation team, xAI’s largest, is responsible for teaching Grok to interpret the world by contextualising and categorising raw data.
In response to queries, xAI pointed to a post on X stating it was hiring across domains and planned to expand its specialist AI tutor team by “10X.” Employees impacted by the layoffs will be paid until either the end of their contracts or November 30, but their access to company systems was cut immediately, the report added.
The move follows the departure of xAI’s finance chief, Mike Liberatore, who left in July after just a few months in the role, according to a Wall Street Journal report.Musk launched xAI in 2023 to challenge Big Tech’s AI dominance, accusing industry leaders of censorship and weak safety practices.
(Edited by : Sheersh Kapoor)
