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And then there were two: Of the original 11 co-founders who kickstarted xAI with Elon Musk three years ago, only two remain as the deep learning lab continues a personnel overhaul to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. That rebuilding, insists Musk, is by design.<\/p>\n
\u201cxAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,\u201d Musk said Thursday<\/a> on his social media platform, X. By most measures, it isn\u2019t going all that smoothly.<\/p>\n The most immediate pressure is competitive. This week, xAI co-founders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang left the outfit after Musk complained that the company\u2019s AI coding tools were not effectively competing with Claude Code or Codex, rival programming assistants made by Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Musk said the company held an all-hands meeting on Wednesday that focused on how to catch up, which he predicted would be possible by the middle of this year.<\/p>\n Coding tools matter so much because they\u2019re where the money is. While an early-year surge of users was powered by xAI\u2019s lax regulation of Grok\u2019s ability to produce sexual and even abusive imagery, coding tools are seen as the key revenue-generating tech for AI labs. That makes xAI\u2019s current lag in this area more than a perception issue; it\u2019s a business problem.<\/p>\n The personnel overhaul extends well beyond this week. A month ago, 11 senior engineers at xAI, including two co-founders, left the company<\/a> following changes Musk described as a reorganization to suit a larger business. That effort was apparently insufficient: The Financial Times reported<\/a> that SpaceX and Tesla executives have parachuted into the company to evaluate employees and fire those who don\u2019t make the grade.<\/p>\n The two remaining co-founders, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, along with Musk, have their work cut out for them.<\/p>\n Musk is now casting a wider net for talent. On Thursday, he said on X that he and another colleage, Baris Akis<\/a>, are currently reviewing rejected employment applications<\/a> in the company, with an eye toward reaching out to promising candidates who should have had a chance to interview. \u201cMy apologies,\u201d Musk added, addressing the pile of strangers he\u2019d ghosted.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> For the sake of comparison, LinkedIn reports that xAI has just over 5,000 employees, compared to more than 7,500 at OpenAI and more than 4,700 at Anthropic.<\/p>\n On the hiring front, there\u2019s at least one encouraging sign. Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg are joining xAI from the AI coding tool company Cursor, where the two held joint responsibility for product engineering. Unlike xAI, Cursor depends on frontier labs for access to the AI models it runs on. Their decision to join xAI may signal the importance of direct access to LLM and computing resources to run them \u2014 and suggest that xAI\u2019s core asset, its own frontier model, is still an attractive draw. <\/p>\n Either way, the pressure to show results is as much external as it is internal. Now that xAI is part of SpaceX, and with a public offering of SpaceX shares anticipated, the cash-burning unit is under pressure to demonstrate real uptake on Grok, its LLM. (A stumbling AI division is not the story Musk needs investors to be reading.)<\/p>\n Longer term, Musk is betting on something bigger than coding tools. xAI\u2019s Macrohard project \u2014 Musk is convinced the name is \u201ca funny reference to Microsoft\u201d \u2014 aims to create an AI agent capable of doing anything a white-collar worker can do on a computer. Toby Pohlen, chosen to lead the project in February, left within weeks, and this week, Business Insider reported<\/a> that Macrohard was on pause.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s response has been to draft another of his companies into the project. He revealed for the first time that Macrohard is a joint effort with Tesla, which is also developing a complementary agent dubbed \u201cDigital Optimus\u201d \u2014 a reference to Tesla\u2019s Optimus humanoid robot. In Musk\u2019s description<\/a>, the xAI language model would direct the Tesla agent as it performs tasks.<\/p>\n It\u2019s ambitious; it\u2019s also not unique. Instead, the vision is not far off from what Perplexity \u2014 an AI-powered search engine \u2014 is doing with its new \u201cEverything is Computer<\/a>\u201d offering, which aims to offer enterprise users a dedicated \u201cdigital proxy\u201d that can orchestrate their digital tasks. It also echoes what entrepreneur Peter Steinberger is now working on at OpenAI, after creating OpenClaw\u2019s popular personal agents.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n