Elon Musk's xAI lays off 500 people training its Grok chatbot

Elon Musk’s artificial quality startup xAI has laid disconnected 500 workers from its information annotation team, which helps bid its Grok chatbot.

The layoffs were earlier reported by Business Insider.

The AI institution notified employees implicit email that it was readying to downsize its squad of generalist AI tutors, according to messages viewed by the publication. The institution said the “strategic pivot” meant prioritizing specializer AI tutors, portion scaling backmost its absorption connected wide AI tutor roles.

In effect to the story, xAI directed reporters to a station connected X, successful which the institution said it plans to grow its specializer AI tutor squad by “10X” and intends to unfastened roles connected its careers page.

The quality information annotator squad astatine xAI plays a cardinal relation successful teaching Grok to recognize the satellite by labeling, contextualizing, and categorizing earthy information utilized to bid the chatbot. The email sent by xAI said that laid-off workers would beryllium paid done either the extremity of their declaration oregon Nov. 30, but their entree to institution systems would beryllium terminated the time of the layoff notice.

Prior to the layoff, the xAI’s information annotation squad was 1 of the largest, with 1,500 full-time and declaration unit members, which included AI tutors. The reorganization of the information annotators squad comes connected the backmost of a enactment shake-up astatine the squad that saw 9 employees reportedly exit the steadfast past week.

As a motion of its changing attack to grooming Grok, xAI connected Thursday asked immoderate of the AI tutors to hole for tests, Business Insider reported, that covered accepted domains specified arsenic STEM, coding, finance, and medicine, arsenic good arsenic quirkier specialties specified arsenic Grok’s “personality and exemplary behavior” and “doomscrollers.”

Musk launched xAI successful 2023 to vie with OpenAI and Google DeepMind, which are battling to triumph the AI race. He introduced Grok arsenic a harmless and truthful alternate to what helium accused competitors of building, “woke” chatbots prone to censorship.