Elon Musk Fires 500 Staff at xAI, Puts College Kid in Charge of Training Grok

"Business Insider reports that the data annotation team that helps train the company's AI chatbot Grok is now being led by Diego Pasini, a college student who graduated from high school in 2023 - and who's been at the company for less than a year. His promotion comes right off the back of a brutal round of layoffs at the team which saw more than 500 staffers, including high-level employees, get the axe. Pasini, post-bloodbath, has quickly settled into his new role."

"The eyebrow raising promotion echoes how Musk empowered a handful of extremely young employees at DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency. One of them was 19-year-old Edward Coristine, also known by his online handle "Big Balls," who was reportedly fired from an old job for leaking company secrets, and ran a company that reportedly helped a notorious cybercrime ring. Another DOGE boy resigned - and then was rehired - after his incredibly racist tweets came to light."

"The stakes are probably lower at xAI, but not insignificant. Data annotation is a crucial step of training an AI model that often gets overlooked. All those mountains of text and images that an AI model devours can be meaningless unless an AI model knows what it's looking at. Data annotators manually go in and add that context. And the AI model in question in this case is Grok, which is integrated into X-formerly-Twitter,"

Diego Pasini, a college student who graduated high school in 2023 and has been at xAI less than a year, now leads the data annotation team that trains the AI chatbot Grok. His promotion followed a brutal round of layoffs that cut more than 500 staffers from the team, and he announced at an all-hands that there would be no further layoffs before another group of over 100 employees were subsequently fired. The promotion echoes prior instances of extremely young hires receiving significant authority under Elon Musk, sparking concerns about vetting and access. Data annotation remains a crucial manual step in effective model training.

Read at Futurism