Elon Musk founded xAI as a competitor to OpenAI to show he was better than the company led by Sam Altman. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars invested in developing Grok and the Dojo infrastructure, Grok is still not a widely used artificial intelligence. Last week, two more xAI founders, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai, left the company.
Now, only two of the 13 xAI founders remain at the company. Zhang was the head of xAI’s imagination team and was reportedly demoted by Musk because the company’s programming products were seen as uncompetitive compared to Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex.
He went on to resign on Thursday. They were replaced by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, who previously worked on the programming AI development team at Cursor. In an answer to X, Musk said that xAI was not built properly to begin with, so it will be “rebuilt” like he did at Tesla.
From the beginning, the direction of xAI was unclear. Other AI companies develop paid products for productivity and creativity, but Grok is only known as an AI that generates obscene images (until xAI was sued) and a fact-checking machine at X.
