His move comes after Tony Wu, who led xAI\u2019s reasoning team, on Monday became the fifth founder to leave \u2014 out of the 12-person group who launched the company in 2023.<\/p>\n
More than half a dozen other researchers have also left in recent weeks, according to social media posts and people familiar with the matter, taking a toll on the start-up\u2019s small technical team. <\/p>\n
Musk held a call with staff on Tuesday to discuss changes in its technical leadership, one of the people said.<\/p>\n
Some staff have complained xAI\u2019s leadership overpromised to Musk on technical developments as they race to catch up to rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, creating unreasonable demands on them, two people said.<\/p>\n
Musk\u2019s recent move to sell xAI, which owns the social media platform X, to his rocket group SpaceX to create a $1.5tn combined group<\/a> has added to the internal turmoil. <\/p>\n Staff have faced backlash from the public around the use of its models to generate explicit sexual content and have had to navigate Musk\u2019s relentless demands. <\/p>\n MacroHard, xAI\u2019s agents and coding project in particular, has fallen short of Musk\u2019s expectations. The system competes with powerful tools such as OpenAI\u2019s Codex and Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code.<\/p>\n Musk has set lofty ambitions for MacroHard. \u201cI\u2019d be surprised if by the end of this year, the digital human emulation has not been solved,\u201d he told the Dwarkesh Podcast last week<\/a>. \u201cI guess that\u2019s what we sort of mean by the MacroHard project. Can you do anything that a human with access to a computer could do?\u201d<\/p>\n The company\u2019s slate of AI \u201ccompanions\u201d \u2014 such as its anime character Ani, which can engage in erotic conversations with users \u2014 has also not delivered the engagement Musk expected, two people said. <\/p>\n Musk has been frustrated by the lack of growth in the amount of time users spend with these companions, despite new characters and resources dedicated to the products, they added.<\/p>\n The world\u2019s richest man has meanwhile been reviewing the performance of leadership and restructuring departments at xAI<\/a>, believing some were underperforming, two people said. <\/p>\n Manuel Kroiss, co-founder of xAI and former Google DeepMind engineer, has been promoted to help run its coding operations, they said.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s deal to combine SpaceX with the AI start-up, announced last week, reflects the billionaire\u2019s plans to launch a network of data-centre satellites to run advanced AI models from space. <\/p>\n But the combination with SpaceX is also expected to help Musk fund xAI\u2019s huge demand for capital to obtain chips, electricity and data centres to power its growth. <\/p>\n Rolling xAI into the rocket group adds to the pressure on the AI start-up\u2019s staff as Musk intends to take the combined group public as early as June.<\/p>\n This year, xAI\u2019s Grok has come under scrutiny from governments globally after requests for AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery of women and children flooded the platform. Last summer, xAI made changes to the chatbot after it praised Hitler and made antisemitic posts on X.<\/p>\n Recommended<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/https:\/\/images.ft.com\/v3\/image\/raw\/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F3bba24.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n