After a large-scale exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence company xAI, the world's richest man Musk, who has always been unruly, rarely showed a side of self-reflection. As a background, after the merger of xAI and SpaceX last month, the "Eleven Arhats" who co-founded the artificial intelligence company with Musk left intensively.
On Thursday, Zhang Guodong, who is responsible for image generation products, announced his departure from the company. Another founding member Liu Haotian also issued a post confirming his departure and bluntly said that he was "burned out."There was another news on Friday that,Dai Zihang has also left xAI. At this point, only two of the "Ocean's 11", Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, are still in the company.
(Source: X)
Faced with this chaotic situation, Musk publicly responded,xAI wasn’t built correctly in the first place, so it’s now being rebuilt from the ground up. Musk also added that similar things happened to Tesla that year.
It seems that due to the intensive exodus of talents, Musk has rarely shown a face of introspection. He wrote that over the past few years, many talented people have been rejected when they applied to join xAI, and were not even given an interview. To this hedeeply sorry.
Musk also said that he is working with the head of recruitment Baris Akis to review the company's interview records and will re-contact candidates who showed potential at that time.
Even though Musk is famous for being strict with his employees, there are still many talents willing to work for the world's richest man. This Thursday,Musk announces poaching two executives from AI programming tool startup Cursor. Musk also admitted earlier this week that xAI is lagging behind in the programming business, which is where competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic are focusing their efforts.
As the company was rebuilding, Musk also did not forget to give the capital market a "picture" to support the huge valuations of AI startups.
It is reported that xAI’s valuation has reached US$200 billion in its US$20 billion financing in January this year. Also in the deal to merge with SpaceX,xAI receives $250 billion valuation.
Musk confirmed earlier on Thursday that"Digital Optimus Prime" - Tesla's version of "Lobster" will be ready for users to experience in about 6 months.
He emphasized that the "Digital Optimus Prime" or "Big Hard" project is a joint project between xAI and Tesla and is part of Tesla's investment agreement in xAI. In this system, Grok plays the role of "commander/navigator" and commands the "Digital Optimus Prime" with his in-depth understanding of the world.The latter is responsible for processing and executing real-time computer screen video, as well as keyboard and mouse operations within the past 5 seconds.
Musk specifically emphasized that this will be "The only AI system with true real-time intelligence”, this is a “very important matter”.
The world's richest man further described that this system will be suitable for all AI4 chip cars, soCars 'can do some office work for you' when owners aren't driving. In addition, Tesla will deploy "millions of dedicated Digital Optimus Units" at Supercharger stations, which have about 7 gigawatts of available power.