Xai, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup at Elon Musk, has fired at least 500 workers to its data annotation team, the report alleges. Employees of the company were reportedly notified via email that the company is shrinking its team of generalist AI tutors. The report cited an internal message to claim that layoff workers were told they were to be paid on November 30th.
What Xai said about the layoffs Groke trainer
According to a report from Business Insider, an internal email sent to Xai employees about the latest employment cuts read: “After a thorough review of human data efforts, we decided to accelerate the expansion and prioritization of specialized AI tutors. This strategic pivot will take effect immediately. As part of this shift, focusing on most generalist AI tutor positions are not required. Employment at Xai is concluded.”The layoff comes after Xai recently announced it was hiring on social media platform X and planned to grow a team of professional AI tutors on “10x.”
In the X post, Xai wrote: “Xai's specialist AI tutors are adding a great value. We will quickly spike our 10x specialized AI tutor team! We hire domains like STEM, finance, medicine, safety and more.The company's largest unit, Xai's data annotation team, is responsible for training GROK by classifying and contextualizing raw data. Before the layoffs, the data annotator's main slack channel had over 1,500 members. However, screenshots from the second half of the night showed that the number had declined by more than 1,000 and continued to fall during the reporting period, the report added.The layoff notification continued quickly after several senior employees, including the former team head, overturned it early in the week, the report emphasized.Over the next few days, workers said they had been called to a one-on-one meeting to review responsibility and projects, and were asked to highlight colleagues they felt deserved of recognition.Earlier this week, Xai told staff to prepare for a team reorganization. The company-wide message instructed workers to prioritize a series of tests by the next morning. This will help you determine your future role.Screenshots viewed by Business Insider revealed that the test aims to categorize annotators and supervisors by their strengths and interests.The notification was posted by Diego Pasini. Diego Pasy has identified 10 workers as new leaders in the team. Pasini, who joined Xai in January and currently on undergraduate leave at Wharton School, asked staff to complete at least one test by the next morning.The test covered fields such as STEM, coding, finance, medicine, and other fields such as Grok's “personality and model behavior” and “shit and doom scrollers.” Additional testing focusing on chatbot safety, red teaming, and handling audio and video content.The announcement noted that the test targeted supervisors and generalist tutors. Xai's team is divided into specialist areas such as STEM, coding, finance, legal, and media, with generalist private tutors responsible for a wide range of issues. Workers said some assessments were conducted on CodeSignal, while others were hosted on Google Forms.According to the screenshots, more than 200 workers responded to Pasini's post with green checkmark emojis, leaving more than 100 comments and questions.
