Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, lost co-founders Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba this week. Six of the twelve original founding members have now departed the company. These exits coincide with xAI’s recent merger with SpaceX and internal preparations for a potential public listing later this year.
Internal reports indicate significant staff dissatisfaction regarding unrealistic development timelines shared with Musk. Leadership reportedly made overreaching promises concerning a coding project intended to rival OpenAI’s Codex.
The company is also facing regulatory scrutiny after its Grok AI model was linked to the generation of explicit deepfake images. Several additional researchers have reportedly resigned from the firm in recent weeks.