{"id":383399,"date":"2026-01-22T02:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T02:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/383399\/"},"modified":"2026-01-22T02:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T02:59:10","slug":"engineer-at-elon-musks-xai-departs-after-spilling-the-beans-in-podcast-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/383399\/","title":{"rendered":"Engineer at Elon Musk’s xAI Departs After Spilling the Beans in Podcast Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sulaiman Ghori, an engineer at Elon Musk\u2019s AI startup xAI, went on the podcast Relentless<\/a> last week to talk about the inner workings of the company that he joined less than a year prior. Days later, he \u201cleft<\/a>\u201d xAI, though the speculation is that he was fired after being a bit too open about the company\u2019s operations.<\/p>\n

So what exactly did Ghori reveal on Relentless? Well, he seemed to tip off the possibility that xAI has been skirting regulations and getting dubious permits when building data centers\u2014specifically, its prized Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. \u201cThe lease for the land itself was actually technically temporary. It was the fastest way to get the permitting through and actually start building things,\u201d he said. \u201cI assume that it\u2019ll be permanent at some point, but it\u2019s a very short-term lease at the moment, technically, for all the data centers. It\u2019s the fastest way to get things done.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked how xAI has gone about getting those temporary leases, Ghori explained that they worked with local and state governments to get permits that allow companies to \u201cmodify this ground temporarily,\u201d and said they are typically for things like carnivals.<\/p>\n

Colossus was not without controversy already. The data center, which xAI brags only took 122 days to build, was powered by at least 35 methane gas turbines that the company reportedly didn\u2019t have the permits to operate<\/a>. Even the Donald Trump-staffed Environmental Protection Agency declared the turbines to be illegal<\/a>. Those turbines, which were operating without permission, contributed to the significant amount of air pollution<\/a> experienced by surrounding communities.<\/p>\n

In addition to the indication of other potential legal end-arounds committed by xAI, Ghori also revealed some of the company\u2019s internal operations, including relying significantly on AI agents to complete work. \u201cRight now, we\u2019re doing a big rebuild of our core production APIs. It\u2019s being done by one person with like 20 agents,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd they\u2019re very good, and they\u2019re capable of doing it, and it\u2019s working well,\u201d though he later stated that the reliance on agents can lead to confusion. \u201cMultiple times I\u2019ve gotten a ping saying, \u2018Hey, this guy on the org chart reports to you. Is he not in today or something?\u2019 And it\u2019s an AI. It\u2019s a virtual employee.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghori\u2019s insight into the use of AI agents certainly comes at an interesting time. Earlier this month, tech journalist Kylie Robison reported<\/a> that AI startup Anthropic, the maker of Claude, cut off xAI\u2019s access to its model. According to Robison, xAI cofounder Tony Wu told his team that the change would cause \u201ca hit on productivity,\u201d and \u201cAI\u00a0is now a critical technology for our own productivity.\u201d He encouraged employees to try \u201call different kinds of models\u201d in the meantime to keep coding.<\/p>\n

Ghori spilled quite a few other details about xAI throughout the interview, none of which seem to have been publicly disputed by Musk or xAI\u2014and they\u2019re not exactly the type to keep quiet if they want to discredit someone. But within a matter of days of the conversation, Ghori left the company despite having just promoted and encouraging people to join his team just days prior to his departure.<\/p>\n

Adding to the intrigue: Just one day after Ghori \u201cleft,\u201d xAI cofounder Greg Yang stepped away from the company<\/a> after being diagnosed with Lyme disease. Yang\u2019s departure hasn\u2019t been connected to Ghori in any way. Dealing with Lyme absolutely sucks, and it\u2019s difficult to treat<\/a>. But it is worth noting that xAI is losing its top folks\u2014and fast.<\/p>\n

As Bloomberg noted<\/a>, co-founders Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy left last year. Maybe Musk will just appoint an AI agent to head the company. Given the legal trouble the company is likely staring down, what with its dubious data center buildouts and recent \u201cundressing\u201d controversy<\/a> surrounding its chatbot Grok, it wouldn\u2019t be much of a surprise if no human wanted to handle what comes next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sulaiman Ghori, an engineer at Elon Musk\u2019s AI startup xAI, went on the podcast Relentless last week to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,995,4340,86,56,54,55,7540],"class_list":{"0":"post-383399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-emerging-technologies","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom","17":"tag-xai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}