Trouble Inside xAI: Key Staff Exit Sparks Tension

Over the weekend, something unusual happened inside Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI. At least nine high-level employees suddenly went off the radar. Their Slack accounts were deactivated, and from the look of things, they may no longer be part of the team.

These weren’t just random workers, they came from the human data management team, the very group responsible for guiding the AI tutors that train Grok, xAI’s chatbot. Just a few days earlier, some of them were still dropping messages on Slack. Now, they’re gone.

What makes this stand out is that one of the deactivated accounts reportedly belonged to a technical staff member who was directly supervising the managers. Before joining xAI, this person worked on Tesla’s Autopilot data annotation team, so it wasn’t just any role that got cut.

Meanwhile, Business Insider reports that xAI hasn’t commented on the shake-up.

xAI’s data annotation team is massive over 1,500 contract and full-time staff, most of them AI tutors. These tutors play a silent but powerful role: they sift through raw data, label it, and give Grok the “human touch” it needs to understand the world better.

But things inside the company are tense. Workers told BI that managers have started scheduling one-on-one check-ins, where employees are asked to prove their worth basically, to show what value they’re bringing to the company. According to one insider, this has created a “sense of panic”.

Most AI firms outsource this kind of work to third-party agencies. But xAI went a different route and it hires many of its US tutors directly. That gives the company tighter control and more privacy, but it also costs more. At one point, xAI tried outsourcing to Scale AI, but the partnership ended earlier this year. Now they’re working with Mercor, another recruiting and annotation service.

Inside xAI, the tutors work on their own Slack channel called TeachX, separate from the engineers. The tutors are split into specialties like science, coding, and translation. Since February alone, around 700 people have joined the annotation team, a sign that Musk is still pushing hard to expand this workforce.

Currently, xAI has nine open roles for the annotation team, with six of them being AI tutor jobs. Pay ranges from $35 to $80 per hour, depending on the role.