Science & Tech
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Big changes are coming to xAI as Elon Musk has revealed his company is being "rebuilt from the foundations up."
The world's richest man founded xAI in March 2023 with the aim of competing with similar firms such as Google and OpenAI in this rapidly developing market, but it has proven challenging.
As of late, the number of departures from the three-year-old company has sparked uncertainty, since out of the 12 original xAI co-founders, just three are left - including Musk, Bloomberg reported.
Taking to his platform X, Musk acknowledged the big structural changes coming “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up. Same thing happened with Tesla."
In a follow-up post, the billionaire shared how he's going to fill the vacant roles within the company.
“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview [at xAI],” he wrote. “My apologies. “[xAI’s head of talent, Baris Akis] and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates.”
This latest update comes a month after The Verge published a feature titled "What's behind the mass exodus at xAI?" where they spoke to a number of former employees who were critical of the company's operation and ethics.
"Trying to do what OpenAI was doing a year ago is not how you beat OpenAI,” one anonymous source told the publication. “Everything is a catch-up. There’s almost zero risky bet. If something hasn’t been done before we’re not going to do it.”
Meanwhile, another added, "There is zero safety whatsoever in the company — not in the image [model], not in the chatbot,” the second source said. “He [Musk] actively is trying to make the model more unhinged because safety means censorship, in a sense, to him.”
Plus, xAI hasn't been without controversy, as earlier this year, its Grok chatbot was widely criticised as users could ‘undress’ images of women and children with the tool.
In response, xAI then updated the chatbot and limited image generation to paid subscribers before it eventually stopped all users from using this function after governments around the world condemned the platform and opened investigations.
Elsewhere from Indy100, Doge staffer ridiculed over four-word response during deposition, and Elon Musk has predicted the exact year humans will make it to Mars.
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