Elon Musk’s xAI fired 500 employees: This includes those who trained Grok; the company will now hire experts in coding, finance and media

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has fired about 500 employees. This includes the team that used to train the Grok chatbot. The company has taken this step as part of a sudden restructuring. Business Insider has given this information.

According to the report, with this restructuring, xAI now wants to focus on specialist tutors, not general roles. The company now wants to hire employees with expertise in areas like science, coding, finance, law and media. These people will replace general workers who used to work on many formats like text, audio and video.

The company sent an internal email to the employees, stating that general tutor roles are being eliminated. According to the report, the employees will be paid till November 30 or the expiry date of their original contract. However, the system access of the fired employees was closed on the same day (September 13).

Now only 1000 employees will remain

According to a report by TechSpot, xAI’s annotation team had more than 1,500 employees, which will now be reduced to 1000. These employees helped train Grok by labeling and organizing data. This data is used to teach the chatbot to answer questions and understand content.

Team lead’s Slack access ended

Several senior managers, including former team leads, lost their Slack access and many employees were called for one-on-one review meetings on their projects and performance. On Saturday, xAI posted on social media platform X: “Specialist AI tutors are adding a lot of value at xAI. We will immediately increase our specialist AI tutor team by 10 times.”