xAI shakes up its team ahead of SpaceX's IPO

xAI, the artificial intelligence company acquired by SpaceX in February, is undergoing an intense reorganization of its engineering team. This decision comes as SpaceX plans to file for an IPO this year, a move that could value the company at over $2 trillion.

Michael Nicholls, Senior Vice President of Starlink at SpaceX and now President of xAI, emphasized in an internal memo that the company is "clearly lagging" behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google. To address this, xAI has initiated a restructuring of its organization, including appointing new leaders for its key divisions.

Devendra Chaplot, a former researcher at Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs, will lead the pre-training of AI models, while Aman Madaan will oversee infrastructure and development tools. Aditya Gupta will be in charge of post-training and reinforcement learning. Beibin Li, a former researcher at Microsoft and Meta, and Xuhui Jia, a former Google DeepMind employee, will handle training for Grok Code, with Yukun Zhu focusing on video and image content.

The product team, led by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg, will concentrate on Grok Main, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine. Jake Palmer and Daniel Dueri will take charge of physical and computational infrastructure, aiming to significantly improve model training performance within two months. Matt Monson, Starlink's Software Director at SpaceX, will lead data efforts at xAI.

Since the acquisition by SpaceX, xAI has lost several co-founders and executives, including Ross Nordeen, Guodong Zhang, Manuel Kroiss, who led Grok Code, and Toby Pohlen, who helped lead Macrohard. Since January, eight engineers who helped found the company have left xAI. This wave of departures has led to ongoing reorganization within the company, with engineers from Tesla and SpaceX coming in to support the transition.

Nicholls described the training performance of computing at xAI as "embarrassing," and improvements are expected. He also indicated in the internal memo that changes take effect immediately and that the company is working to assign titles to employees that better describe their work. xAI has lost dozens of employees since February and has downsized parts of its teams working on Grok Imagine and Macrohard earlier this year. Recently, several members of the recruitment team have also been reduced.

Elon Musk stated that xAI was not built correctly the first time and is being rebuilt from the ground up. He also mentioned that the company is looking at former xAI candidates to recruit new people, highlighting the importance of strengthening the team with proven talent.