The artificial intelligence company xAI owned by businessman Elon Musk was reported to have laid off around 500 workers in its data annotation team according to an internal message seen by Business Insider .
cited a Business Insider report that the company announced via email the implementation of an immediate "strategic shift" and decided to "accelerate the expansion and prioritization of our specialist AI tutors, while reducing our focus on general AI tutor roles."
"As part of this change in focus, we will no longer have a need for most general AI tutor positions and your tenure at xAI will end," xAI wrote in its email.
According to Business Insider , the workers affected by the layoffs include about a third of the 1,500-member xAI data annotation team.
The data annotation team at xAI is responsible for labeling and preparing the data used to train the company's Grok chatbot.
When asked for comment on the report, xAI referred to a statement on Elon Musk's X platform that the company "will soon be expanding our team of Specialist AI tutors by 10-fold."
"We are hiring in a variety of fields such as STEM, finance, medicine, safety, and more," the company said.
