Recently, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has experienced a large-scale talent loss, with several members of the founding team leaving one after another. This phenomenon has drawn Musk's attention, who expressed deep regret and acknowledged shortcomings in the company's early construction.
According to reports, last Thursday, Zhang Guodong, who was responsible for image generation products, announced his resignation. Another co-founder, Liu Haotian, also confirmed his departure on social media, saying he had "burned out." Soon after, it was reported that Dai Zihang had also left xAI. Currently, only Manuel Kroyes and Ross Nodin, two founders, remain at the company.
Musk stated that xAI was not properly built initially, and therefore is currently being rebuilt from the ground up. He said that many talented applicants were unable to join xAI in recent years, which he found very regrettable. Musk and the head of recruitment are reviewing the company's interview records and hope to reconnect with those candidates who performed well at the time.
Despite the talent exodus, Musk has still attracted new talent. He announced this week that he successfully brought in two executives from the AI programming tools startup Cursor. At the same time, Musk admitted that xAI is relatively behind in the programming business, which is a field where competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic have made significant developments.
While rebuilding the team, Musk is also painting a picture of xAI's future in the capital market. In January of this year, xAI's valuation reached $20 billion, and after merging with SpaceX, it increased to $250 billion. Additionally, Musk revealed that Tesla will launch the "Digital Optimus" project, which is expected to be available for user experience within six months. The project aims to create an AI system with real-time intelligence that can assist car owners with office tasks, especially when the owner is not in the car.
Musk emphasized that "Digital Optimus" will be an AI system with deep understanding, capable of processing user operations in real time. In the future, a large number of Digital Optimus units will be deployed at Tesla's superchargers, providing powerful computing capabilities.
