Earlier this week, two cofounders of Elon Musk’s xAI abruptly announced their departure, meaning that half of the startup’s original 12 cofounders are now officially out.
And while Musk has since made the case that he was shaking up the company’s ranks as part of a “reorganization,” which “unfortunately required parting ways with some people,” several former staffers told The Verge that the reality is they grew frustrated with the company’s ethical carelessness and stagnating technological progress.
One source, who left earlier this year, told the outlet that xAI was “stuck in the catch-up phase” and struggling to differentiate itself from the competition.
“Although we were iterating really fast, we were never able to get to a point like, ‘Oh, we’ve made a step function change over what OpenAI or Anthropic or other companies had released,” he told The Verge.
The source also accused the company of putting safety last, calling it a “dead org at xAI.”
“There is zero safety whatsoever in the company — not in the image [model], not in the chatbot,” a second source who also recently left the company told the site, arguing that Musk is actively “trying to make the model more unhinged because safety means censorship, in a sense, to him.”
It’s a notable vote of no confidence, highlighting the toll of the endless controversies the company has been embroiled in. The company’s social media platform, X, has been overrun by non-consensual sexual images of women and even children, many of which were generated using xAI’s Grok chatbot.
The company’s handling of the crisis has left plenty to be desired, as CSAM continues to be a major issue on the platform.
Under Musk’s leadership, xAI has doubled down on adult content in an arguably desperate move to keep up with some extremely steep competition, a decision that appears to have backfired on the company.
Meanwhile, some staffers are seemingly looking for a more engaging place of work.
“Trying to do what OpenAI was doing a year ago is not how you beat OpenAI,” the second source told The Verge. “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.”
Those who remain at the company have to endure Musk’s infamous managerial style.
“You survive by shutting up and doing what Elon wants,” the second source added.
The stakes are high. After being folded into Musk’s SpaceX, the joint company is gearing up for what could be the largest IPO in history. But going public may bring renewed scrutiny into the company’s operations — and given what we’ve seen so far, chances are xAI has plenty of other skeletons in the closet we don’t know about yet.
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