In the competitive landscape of artificial intelligence, xAI is making significant strides to align itself with SpaceX as it approaches a much-anticipated IPO. This strategic move is accompanied by a comprehensive restructuring of its engineering team, a decision revealed in a memo accessed by Business Insider.
Michael Nicholls, a senior executive at SpaceX, acknowledged the urgency of closing the gap with competitors, stating the company is “clearly behind.” Nicholls has also assumed the role of president at xAI, as informed by a source familiar with the development.
SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI earlier this year aligns with its IPO plans, projected to potentially surpass a valuation of $2 trillion.
xAI’s organizational changes aim to keep pace with industry leaders like OpenAI and Google. The company has seen a turnover in its founding members and leadership, including the recent departure of cofounder Ross Nordeen. Elon Musk is reportedly applying strategies from Tesla to revamp xAI amid these transitions, as the company moves towards a high-stakes IPO.
Model Training
Key figures in the restructured xAI team include Devendra Chaplot, who will lead the pre-training phase, and Aman Madaan, responsible for model factory and tooling. Aditya Gupta will oversee post-training and reinforcement learning, focusing on refining models for practical applications.
Beibin Li is set to head post-training for Grok Code, while Xuhui Jia and Yukun Zhu will lead efforts in video and image training, bringing experience from companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Google DeepMind.
Product and Infrastructure
Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg, recent additions from AI coding leader Cursor, will guide the product team managing Grok Main, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine. Jake Palmer will manage physical infrastructure, and Daniel Dueri, the director of software engineering at SpaceX, will lead compute infrastructure.
Matt Monson from SpaceX takes on a dual role, adding leadership of data at xAI to his responsibilities. The compute team’s performance is currently under scrutiny, with plans to significantly enhance it in the coming months, as noted by Nicholls in the memo.
xAI has experienced considerable personnel changes since February, with departures from its founding engineers and reductions in teams such as video and image generation and AI agent projects. More recently, the recruiting team also saw cuts.
Musk expressed on X that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” The company is revisiting previous candidates for potential hires, aiming to attract talent that was previously overlooked.
“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI,” Musk stated on X. The rapid changes at xAI reflect its urgent efforts to reposition itself within the AI sector, with SpaceX’s IPO adding further pressure.
