- Elon Musk asked xAI staff for a one-page summary of past and future work by Thursday noon
- xAI is shifting focus to specialised AI tutors in STEM, finance, medicine, and safety sectors
- Over 500 generalist AI tutors were reportedly fired during xAI’s recent reorganisation
Elon Musk, the CEO of xAI, has once again notified his staff members to provide summaries of their recent work and demonstrate "what you've accomplished."
Musk asked all xAI employees to "send a one-page summary of what you've accomplished in the past four weeks and what you intend to accomplish in the next four weeks" in an email issued to colleagues on Tuesday afternoon.
According to a copy of the email, obtained by CNN, Musk wrote, "This is due by noon on Thursday."
The demand comes at a time xAI is undergoing a major reorganisation. With a strategy shift towards specialised AI instructors in industries like STEM, finance, medicine, and safety, Musk's xAI reportedly fired over 500 data annotators last week, many of whom were from its generalist AI tutor team, according to Reuters.
The company sent out an email to its staff informing them of its intention to reduce the number of generalist AI tutors. In response to a request for comment, xAI cited a post on X that stated the firm was hiring for positions across domains and intended to grow its workforce of specialised AI tutors by "10X."
This is the second such instance when Musk has asked his staff to explain what they have been doing and what they plan to do in the next few weeks.
According to a staff email obtained by The Verge in August 2024, the firm intended to provide stock options in accordance with the expected impact on employees. Therefore, employees must submit a one-page brief to the leadership outlining their contributions to the business in order to receive their stock.
At the time, the CEO reportedly asked all employees of X to provide a "one page summary of your contributions to the company over the last month and over the last twelve months" to make "stock and option awards proportionate to the likely future contributions of people at X."
All federal employees received bulk emails asking them to highlight their accomplishments over the last week while Musk worked with the White House and the Department of Government Efficiencies. At the time, Musk declared on X that "failure to respond will be considered as a resignation."
Mr Musk once requested that staff members print down lines of code they had just developed when he first purchased Twitter in 2022. Then, turning around, he instructed them to destroy the printed material.
In an effort to counter Big Tech's AI surge, Elon Musk founded xAI in 2023 and accused industry leaders of harsh censorship and inadequate safety regulations. It is the driving force behind the AI chatbot Grok, a part of the X social network.
