Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, laid off 500 employees from its data annotation team late Friday, according to internal messages reviewed by Business Insider.
The company announced a “strategic pivot,” revealing plans to accelerate the growth and focus of its specialist AI tutors while reducing the emphasis on general AI tutor positions.
“As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and your employment with xAI will conclude,” the company reportedly communicated to affected employees.
The layoffs reportedly impact about one-third of xAI’s 1,500-person data annotation team, which plays a crucial role in labeling and preparing data to train xAI’s chatbot, Grok.
When contacted for confirmation, xAI referenced a statement posted on X (the platform owned by Musk), where the company revealed that it would “immediately surge our Specialist AI tutor team by 10x.”
“We are hiring across domains like STEM, finance, medicine, safety, and many more,” the company added.
