Musk's Round-the-Clock Monitoring Seven Days a Week Drove Away Over 50 Core Researchers, Nearly Resetting SpaceX's AI Pre-training Team

According to Beating Motion monitoring, the talent drain at SpaceXAI (formerly xAI) is much more severe than previously known. This channel reported yesterday that the pre-training lead Juntao Zhuang, post-training search lead Tianyi Zhang, and speech lead David Haxton all resigned within a week, and it has now been revealed that since SpaceX's acquisition in February, over 50 Grok model researchers have left through layoffs, terminations, or voluntary exits. The research and development team, which had over 200 members at the end of last year, has been significantly reduced, with only a few members remaining in the pre-training team.

Multiple former employees directly attribute the reasons to Musk's management style. During his intense focus on the AI business, the team was required to attend meetings at the Palo Alto office seven days a week, facing internally perceived unrealistic model training deadlines. To meet these deadlines, the team had to skip crucial steps that could impact model performance. Musk claimed in April that the model factory was up and running, with a new base model version released every two weeks. However, the Grok 4.4 model with 1 trillion parameters, originally scheduled for delivery in early May, has yet to be seen.

The talent exodus is quickly being absorbed by competitors. Meta has hired at least 11 individuals, Thinking Machines led by Mira Murati has recruited at least 7, and former code lead Beibin Li has joined MiroMind, founded by Tianqiao Chen. Concurrently, SpaceXAI has leased all the computing power of a large data center to Anthropic.