xAI Continual Rebuilding Team: Co-founder of Sweep and Firebender Hired Simultaneously, Personally Welcomed by Musk

According to 1M AI News monitoring, xAI today welcomed two AI Programming Track founders simultaneously, with Elon Musk replying "Welcome!" to each of their tweets.

William Zeng is the co-founder and CEO of the AI programming tool Sweep. Previously a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Roblox, Zeng founded Sweep in 2023, where he developed the earliest open-source AI programming agent (7000+ stars on GitHub) and the highest-rated AI plugin on the JetBrains platform (4.9 stars, over 40,000 installations).

Aman Gottumukkala is the founder of the Android AI programming tool Firebender, the most widely used AI programming agent on the Android platform, with a three-person team achieving annual revenue in the million-dollar range. Gottumukkala previously interned at Google, Instagram, among other companies, and was selected as a Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellow.

Both individuals have stated that they will be simultaneously serving xAI and SpaceX, focusing on AI programming. xAI officially merged with SpaceX in February of this year through an all-stock transaction, resulting in a combined valuation of $1.25 trillion, with both now being part of the same entity. Musk recently admitted that xAI "was not built right" and is currently undergoing a fundamental rebuild, with only 2 of the 12 co-founders remaining.

Previously, xAI's core AI Agent project Macrohard had stalled, and with Mistral co-founder Chaplot joining to lead Grok training last week, and two senior leaders from Cursor being poached, Sweep and Firebender's two founders are now following suit, as xAI intensively supplements its team with external talent for rebuilding.