Desk Report:
Elon Musk’s XAI data annotation team is undergoing a massive layoff and leadership change. In the meantime, the company’s artificial intelligence technology ‘Grok’ training team has been handed over to a college student who joined just eight months ago.
Diego Pasini, who graduated from high school in 2023, is currently working as the head of XAI’s data annotation team. This team labels, classifies and analyzes data to help Grok understand real-world data.
A few days ago, the first phase closed the Slack accounts of at least 9 high-ranking employees. Then, on September 12, the company laid off more than 500 employees at once.
It is worth noting that Slack is an online messaging and team communication tool that is used to facilitate communication, file sharing, discussions and coordination between colleagues in the office or workplace.
Pasini told the remaining employees at a meeting on September 15 that there are no plans for any further layoffs. However, within a few days, more than 100 more employees were laid off, according to three employees.
The team currently has about 900 members, down from about 1,500 before the layoffs.
Diego Pasini joined XAI in January of this year. He won an XAI hackathon in San Francisco. Two others who participated in the hackathon later got jobs at XAI and Tesla.
A hackathon is a competitive and collaborative event where programmers, software developers, designers, data scientists, product managers, and other technology-related people create new software, apps, or technology-based solutions within a specified time frame (usually 24-72 hours).
According to his LinkedIn profile, Pasini was studying computer science and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. However, he is currently on a break from his studies. The university authorities refused to confirm his student identity.
Pasini was a 2024 fellow at the investment firm Contrari, which has worked with companies like Anduril and Replit. His profile reads, “I am optimistic about the future of robotics and hard tech startups.”
Pasini graduated in 2023 from The Pingree School in New Jersey, where he has an annual tuition of more than $47,000. He was a member of the robotics team and presented research on drones at MIT in 2022.
The rise of Musk’s young circle
In early September, Pasini posted supportive posts on X that Musk followed. “Even half a smart person knows that all of Musk’s companies are still in their infancy,” he wrote.
On GitHub, Pasini follows many of Musk’s network, including Tesla’s former AI director Andrej Karpathi, George Hotz, who worked at the Twitter acquisition, and Luke Faritor, a young employee at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Dodge).
In addition to Faritor at Dodge, at least five other young employees, aged 19 to 24, are working there, including 19-year-old Edward Koristin.
In a Slack announcement before the layoffs, Pasini said that employees would have to focus on a series of tests that would determine their future at XAI. Since then, several employees have been called into meetings one after another, where they were asked to explain their work.
The old team leader was a veteran manager. He had worked on Tesla’s Autopilot data annotation team for a decade. The team questioned Pasini’s younger age and experience.
Multiple employees have claimed, with screenshots, that two employees were deactivated within hours after criticizing Pashini on Slack.
Source: Business Insider
