And then there were two: Of the original 11 co-founders who kicked off xAI with Elon Musk three years ago, only two remain as the deep learning lab continues a staff overhaul to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. Musk insists that the rebuild is in line with design.

“xAI wasn’t built right the first time, so it’s being rebuilt from the ground up,” Musk said said on Thursday On its social media platform, X, by most measures, it’s not all going smoothly.

The most immediate pressure is competitive. This week, xAI co-founders Ziheng Dai and Gudong Zhang left the organization after Musk complained that the company’s AI coding tools weren’t competing effectively with rival programming assistant CloudCode, or Codex, made by Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Musk said the company held an all-hands meeting Wednesday focused on how to catch up, which he predicted would be possible by the middle of this year.

Coding tools matter a lot because they are where the money is. Although user growth in the first year was fueled by lax regulation of XAI’s ability to generate grok’s sexual and even abusive imagery, coding tools are seen as a key revenue-generating technology for AI labs. This makes xAI’s current lag in this area more than a perceptual problem. This is a business problem.

The personnel rehabilitation process continues this week. A month ago, 11 senior xAI engineers, including two co-founders, left the company following changes that Musk described as a major restructuring for the business. That effort was apparently insufficient: Financial Times Reported that SpaceX and Tesla executives have parachuted into the company to evaluate employees and fire those who don’t make the grade.

The other two co-founders, Manuel Cruz and Ross Nordin, along with Musk, have their work cut out for them.

Musk is now casting a wide net for talent. On Thursday, he said on X that he and another college, Twenty-two-oneCurrently under review. Job applications rejected At the company, with a focus on reaching out to promising candidates who should have had the opportunity to interview. “My apologies,” Musk added, addressing the pile of strangers he ghosted.

For comparison’s sake, LinkedIn reports that xAI has just over 5,000 employees, while OpenAI has over 7,500 and Anthropic has over 4,700.

On the recruiting front, there is at least one encouraging sign. Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg are joining xAI from AI coding tool company Cursor, where they shared responsibility for product engineering. Unlike xAI, Cursor relies on Frontier Labs to access the AI ​​models it runs on. Their decision to join xAI may signal the importance of LLM and direct access to computing resources to run them—and suggest that xAI’s core asset, its own frontier model, is still an attractive draw.

Either way, the pressure to show results is as much external as it is internal. Now that xAI is part of SpaceX, and with an expected public offering of SpaceX shares, cash-burning unit Grok is under pressure to demonstrate real uptake on its LLM. (A stumbling AI division is not the story Musk needs investors to read.)

Longer term, Musk is betting on something bigger than coding tools. xAI’s MacroHard project — Musk believes the name is “a funny reference to Microsoft” — aims to create an AI agent capable of doing anything a white-collar worker can do on a computer. Toby Poehlen, who was tapped to lead the project in February, left within weeks, and this week, Business Insider Reported that the macro was on hard pause.

Musk’s response is to add another of his companies to the project. He revealed for the first time that MacroHard is a joint effort with Tesla, which is also developing a complementary agent called “Digital Optimus” – a reference to Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot. In musk Descriptionthe xAI language model will instruct the Tesla agent as it works.

It is ambitious; This is not unique either. Instead, the vision isn’t too far off from what Perplexity — an AI-powered search engine — is doing with its new “Everything is a computer.” offering, which aims to offer enterprise users a dedicated “digital proxy” that can orchestrate their digital tasks. It also echoes what Peter Steinberger, who is now working on at OpenAI, after creating OpenCloud’s popular personal agents.