Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI laid off about 500 employees on Friday night, according to internal messages obtained by Business Insider.
The company stated in the messages that a “strategic pivot” was being made and that it had decided to prioritize expert AI trainers while reducing general AI trainer roles:
Impact on data processing team
According to Business Insider, these cuts affected about a third of the 1,500-member data labeling team. This team was preparing data to train xAI’s chatbot Grok.
Investment in specialized team
xAI responded to the verification request by referencing a statement published on Musk’s owned social network X:
The company emphasized that the strategic change aims to focus on expertise-driven growth and increasing data preparation capacity.
