‘Not built right the first time’ — Musk’s xAI is starting over again, again
And then there were two: Of the original 11 co-founders who kickstarted xAI with Elon Musk three years ago, only two remain as the deep learning lab continues a personnel overhaul to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. That rebuilding, insists Musk, is by design. “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk said Thursday on his social media platform, X. By most measures, it isn’t going all that smoothly. The most immediate pressure is competitive. This week, xAI co-founders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang left the outfit after Musk complained that the company’s AI coding tools were not effectively competing with Claude Code or Codex, rival programming assistants made by Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Musk said the…
