AI lays off 500 employees of the data annotation team.

According to internal sources obtained by Business Insider, Elon Musk's AI startup xAI fired 500 team members on Friday evening. The report stated that an email announced that the company would immediately undergo a "strategic shift" to "accelerate the expansion of the professional AI mentor team and prioritize it, while reducing focus on general AI mentor positions." The report indicated that xAI wrote in the email, "As part of this focus adjustment, we no longer require most of the general AI mentor positions, your employment with xAI will therefore be terminated." Business Insider reported that the layoffs accounted for about a third of the 1500 people in xAI's data annotation team, which is primarily responsible for annotating and preprocessing data for training xAI's chatbot Grok.