Billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI is entering a major transformation phase when facing a wave of senior leaders leaving in the context of increasingly fierce AI competition.
In a post on X social network, Musk admitted: "xAI was not built properly from the beginning, so it is being rebuilt from the foundation.
This technology billionaire also held a full-time employee meeting last week to discuss strategies to help chatbot developer Grok catch up with competitors by mid-2026.
xAI was co-founded by Musk and 11 AI researchers about three years ago. However, currently only two of the original co-founders are still working at the company. xAI's current personnel scale is about more than 5,000 people, while OpenAI has more than 7,500 employees and Anthropic about 4,700 people.
Recently, two co-founders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang have left the company. Previously, a number of other senior engineers also left after changes that Musk described as a restructuring to accommodate larger business scale.
These fluctuations take place in the context that xAI has just undergone a major merger when it was acquired by SpaceX to solve the increasing operating costs of the AI industry, especially chip, data center and energy costs.
After the deal, personnel from SpaceX and Tesla were transferred to xAI to assess work performance and cut inefficient positions.
Although the chatbot Grok recorded significant user growth this year, xAI still faces difficulties in dominating the enterprise AI market, although this is a field that is assessed to have the potential to generate stable revenue.
Competitors such as OpenAI or Anthropic are currently leading in the field of AI programming tools, programming assistants and automation plugins.
Meanwhile, Grok also caused controversy when the ability to create images of chatbots was exploited to create sensitive or pornographic content, causing regulatory agencies in many countries to express concern.
In the context that SpaceX plans to issue shares to the public in the future, xAI is also under pressure to prove its business efficiency, instead of continuing to "burn money" for technology development.
However, Musk still shows confidence in the company's future. He declared that xAI can catch up with its competitors this year and surpass them in the next three years.
To achieve this goal, the company is promoting the recruitment of AI talents. Musk said xAI is reviewing many previous rejected applications to find potential personnel.
Some experts in the AI industry are also expected to join the company, including engineers who used to work at the AI Cursor programming startup.
Along with that, xAI is developing new AI tools, including the ambition to build an artificial intelligence assistant that can perform many office jobs on computers.
Mr. Musk recently also announced a cooperation project between Tesla and xAI, aimed at creating an AI system capable of simulating the operations of software companies through automated AI agents.
