What happened at xAI
Was it really just a reorg, or people cashing out? Also: OpenAI gets a futurist.
Happy Wednesday. I’d like to call a moratorium on frontier AI lab employees hyping their departures with grand statements about the future.
“This is not an easy place to work”
The question seemingly every tech journalist, including myself, has been asking on social media for the last 24 hours: What is happening at xAI?
A string of recent departures, including two of the AI lab’s co-founders, has sparked some fun theories, including that the recent merger with SpaceX means additional security clearances are needed that some xAI employees don’t meet. In reality, sources say the reason mostly boils down to what all-too-often actually drives the AI industry’s drama: money.
