An internal memo shows that Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is integrating more closely with SpaceX on the eve of SpaceX’s historic IPO. At the same time, xAI is also undergoing another large-scale reorganization of its engineering team. Michael Nichols, SpaceX's senior vice president of Starlink projects, said xAI is "significantly behind" its competitors and is taking steps to catch up as quickly as possible. According to people familiar with the matter, Nichols recently became president of xAI.
SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year, and the company is expected to hold an initial public offering (IPO) this year that could value it at more than $2 trillion.
With the merger with SpaceX, xAI has undergone a series of organizational restructuring in the fierce competition with artificial intelligence competitors OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. The company has lost several co-founders and senior leaders, most recently Ross Nordin, who had been one of Musk's closest lieutenants. Now, Musk is following Tesla's example and rebuilding the company from scratch, even as it continues to deal with ongoing attrition and layoffs.
Devendra Chaplot, a former Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs researcher who joined xAI last month, will lead the pretraining effort, the initial stage in which models learn general patterns from massive data sets such as text, images, or code.
Aman Madaan will be responsible for the development of model factories and tools, including infrastructure, data pipelines and training workflows for developing and improving AI models. Aditya Gupta will lead post-training and reinforcement learning, the final stage of fine-tuning the model to match human preferences and optimize it for real-world application scenarios such as chat or coding assistance.
Beibin Li, a researcher who has worked at Microsoft and Meta, will be responsible for post-training of Grok Code. Xuhui Jia, who previously worked at Google DeepMind, will be jointly responsible for video and image training with Yukun Zhu.
Products and infrastructure
The company's product team will be led by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg. The two engineers joined the company in March from AI coding giant Cursor. The product team will be responsible for the development of Grok Main, Grok Voice and Grok Imagine.
The physical infrastructure will be overseen by Jake Palmer, and the computing infrastructure will be overseen by SpaceX director of software engineering Daniel Dueri. Other SpaceX employees have also taken on leadership roles. SpaceX Starlink software director Matt Monson will also lead xAI’s data efforts.
Nichols said in the memo that the xAI computing team's training performance was "embarrassingly low" and that the company plans to significantly improve its performance over the next two months.
Nichols said in the memo that the changes are effective immediately and that the company is working to re-create titles for employees that better reflect their jobs.
In February of this year, Musk restructured the company for the first time after xAI was acquired by SpaceX. Eight engineers who co-founded the company with Musk have left the company since January.
After the departure of several co-founders, xAI's organizational structure has been almost constantly in flux, with Musk sometimes needing to manage dozens of direct reports. Engineers from Tesla and SpaceX have also come to the company's offices in Palo Alto to help make these adjustments, people familiar with the matter said.
XAI has laid off dozens of employees since February, according to previous reports. The company earlier this year laid off some of the teams responsible for video and image generation tool Grok Imagine and artificial intelligence agent project Macrohard. The company recently laid off several more members of its recruiting team, according to people familiar with the matter.
In March, Musk said at X that "xAI was not originally built well, so it is being rebuilt from the ground up."
He also said that the company is re-screening previous xAI candidates to attract new talents.
"In the past few years, many talented people have been rejected by xAI and have not even been given the chance to interview." Musk wrote on X.