Elon Musk has framed the recent exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, as a necessary growing pain, saying the company’s evolution “required parting ways with some people.”<\/p>\n
Musk’s post<\/a> on X (formerly Twitter) followed an all-hands meeting<\/a> at xAI where he told the audience: “We’re actually going to have a mass driver on the Moon,” although he acknowledged that such a thing was currently in the realm of science fiction.<\/p>\n A mass driver is best thought of as an electromagnetic catapult that flings payloads into space at high velocities. That’s an ideal thing to have if you wanted to, say, have a datacenter in space consisting of a million satellites<\/a>.<\/p>\n The science fiction reference was well made. Musk has a reputation for making bold statements and then singularly failing to deliver. Remember humans on Mars in 2024 or 2026<\/a>? It would be impractical to list every missed prediction, but Musk’s track record on timelines is relevant when assessing the credibility of new forecasts.<\/p>\n Musk wrote: “Join xAI if the idea of mass drivers on the Moon appeals to you.”<\/p>\n Or head for the door, as half of the xAI founding team has already done. Yuhai Wu announced<\/a> his departure on Monday, and Jimmy Ba packed up his things<\/a> on Tuesday. Both were full of praise for xAI, but the fact that six members of the company’s 12-person founding team have now departed is notable.<\/p>\n Musk has spent the last few weeks rolling out one ambitious announcement after another. This month has seen SpaceX acquire xAI<\/a>, plans for a datacenter in space<\/a>, the abrupt pivot<\/a> from missions to Mars to the Moon, and so on. Even in the fast-paced world of AI development, it is difficult not to imagine the whiplash felt by some employees within Musk’s companies.<\/p>\n Musk stated: “xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution. As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism.” \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk has framed the recent exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, as a necessary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-427366","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-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427366","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=427366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}