xAI co-founder Manuel Kroiss announced his departure, leaving only 1 of the 11 co-founders remaining, as the AI team crafted by Musk collapses.
1. 11 out of 10! The xAI team is falling apart
Since January of this year, core members of xAI have been leaving one after another: Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang have resigned in succession. Now, Manuel Kroiss has also officially announced his departure, leaving only Ross Nordeen from Tesla to hold the fort.
As the head of pre-training for the xAI model, Manuel Kroiss reported directly to Musk, having previously worked at Google and DeepMind, making him one of the core technical supports of the team. His departure signifies the complete disintegration of the early technical foundation of xAI.
2. Musk admits defeat: the first attempt was wrong, time to start over
In the face of the team's collapse, Musk has finally publicly acknowledged his shortcomings, admitting that xAI lags behind competitors in programming capabilities. The first attempt at xAI was not built correctly, and they are working to rebuild from the ground up.
He is personally stepping in to rescue the situation: taking over direct reports from dozens of employees, reallocating personnel from Tesla and SpaceX, and even re-contacting past job applicants who were previously rejected, in an attempt to quickly rebuild the team.
Whether xAI can turn things around in the short term remains to be seen.