xAI was founded in 2023 and is already radically transforming. Now a key part of a strange conglomerate which could soon become one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world, it seems that xAI in particular is becoming the distillation of Elon Musk’s mindset in company form. Perhaps it’s unrelated to the fact that all of its non-Musk creators have now left the scene.
Apart from Elon Musk, none of the 12 original co-founders of xAI still work for the company as of this week, according to Business Insider. The departure of Ross Nordeen, a former Tesla manager in the “autopilot” (driver assistance) division, reportedly makes Musk the last founder standing.
Two weeks ago, Elon Musk wrote in X that xAI, the artificial intelligence company currently owned by SpaceX, and on its way to an IPO planned to be the greatest ever—“it wasn’t built right the first time, so it’s being rebuilt from the ground up.” The departures of approximately half of the co-founders. They were reported a few days later of SpaceX’s surprise acquisition of xAI in February. The steady pace of founder departures continued until Nordeen left last week.
One might be mistaken in thinking that the content of Grok’s output is the cause of this restructuring.
After all, it was founded in March 2023, which happened to be a time in the culture wars when right-wing fervor for the concept of wokeness was at its peak before the frenzy died down a bit. as reflected in Google Trends searches. At the time, Musk was not yet officially part of a Republican presidential administration, but he was beginning to make right-wing politics central to his personal mission, which is why xAI in its early days was openly described as a creator of right-wing alternatives to artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT.
Last summer, users discovered that Grok was willing to praise Hitler and defend Nazi ideas. cataloged in detail by my colleague Matt Novak. xAI He finally issued a long apology. and said it had modified Grok’s internal workings.
Late last year, X users began using xAI’s signature chatbot, Grok, to effortlessly edit images of other X users without requiring their knowledge or consent. Grok’s The integration into X had made this exceptionally smooth.requiring only a post addressed to Grok. Many of these images, however, included sexualized content and near-nudity, and many of the minors represented. the situation prompted regulators around the world to take various measures. xAI apologized for at least one imagesaying that it “violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM.” It should be noted that this apology was caused by user X addressing Grok directly and seeking an apology.
Despite all the controversies, Musk seems largely satisfied with much of the company’s output in recent months. On February 17, he aware that the latest version of Grok, version 4.20, was “BASED” and included screenshots showing that, compared to other popular chatbots, it refuses to even entertain the idea of the United States being “on stolen lands.”
But if Musk has signaled a change of direction for xAI’s actual products, it has little to do with the political leanings or worrying behavior of its core model. On the other hand, the Financial Times reported earlier this month that Musk was letting co-founders go amid turmoil over xAI’s perceived coding failures.
appearing in a video call at something called the Abundance Conference This month, Musk said he had just been in an all-hands meeting on coding that had delayed him for that same call. It had been, he said, “going through all the things that need to happen to essentially catch up and surpass our competitors in coding, which I think we will do. We should probably get there by the middle of this year.”
Starting in 2025 and continuing through this year, Claude, the flagship large language model of xAI competitor Anthropic, has come to be considered an indispensable part of AI coding, particularly coding and other coding-adjacent tasks performed through artificial intelligence platforms such as OpenClaw. Another of xAI’s competitors, OpenAI, has hired the creator of OpenClawand oriented towards business and productivity applications for AI.
So xAI, in conjunction with Tesla’s computing division is launching, well, something like that and calling the company “Macrohard.” Musk’s own descriptions Much of the software Macrohard will produce is overloaded with classic Musk bluster and is unusually difficult to parse for real content. He says the product he has in mind will be “like a much more advanced and sophisticated version of turn-by-turn navigation software,” but that it will be “able to emulate the function of entire companies.” What you seem to be pointing to is a more competent version of OpenClaw.
As a prominent part of SpaceX during its IPO, Musk clearly wants investors to think big, which is why Signaling plans to build a Dyson sphere. and absorb increasing amounts of solar energy, to build AI data centers in spaceand very soon surpass all human intelligence combined with AI. Most, if not all, founders of AI companies make big promises, but Musk’s promises may be the biggest.
Interestingly, however, the IPO plan would seem to contradict what Musk has said in the past about running public companies: he hates it. Time and time again he has said he can’t stand it. the pressure placed on him as CEO by shareholders expecting returns and the problems of the economy in general. This move will even make X, formerly known as Twitter, part of a public company again, after the goal of buying Twitter in the first place seemed to be take it private.
But xAI would need to quickly build energy infrastructure and data centers (and supposedly do so literally in space) to secure the top spot in the AI rankings. To that end, one possible purpose of the SpaceX IPO stands out: not just being valued at an estimated value 1.75 trillion dollars after the IPO and everything that means for Musk’s net worth, but also for the company itself to raise up to 80 billion dollars of investors in the process. Much of that potentially record investment amount will be a war chest of liquid, spendable cash.
When you’ve made crazy promises to the world about building crazy things, the only thing that can give you the chance to do it all is a crazy amount of money.
