{"id":5326,"date":"2025-09-19T13:04:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T13:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/elon-musk-college-kid-xai-grok\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T13:04:24","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T13:04:24","slug":"elon-musk-college-kid-xai-grok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/elon-musk-college-kid-xai-grok\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk Fires 500 Staff at xAI, Puts College Kid in Charge of Training Grok"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"After<\/div>\n

Remember when Elon Musk hired a bunch of youngsters to gut the federal government? Well, now he’s put one in charge of a key division at his company xAI.<\/p>\n

Business Insider <\/i>reports that<\/a>\u00a0the 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 \u2014 and who’s been at the company for less than a year.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Pasini, post-bloodbath, has quickly settled into his new role.<\/p>\n

On September 15, he led an all-hands meeting where he told everyone who hadn’t already gotten fired that there’d be no more layoffs, three employees told BI<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the meeting, another group of more than 100 employees were fired.<\/p>\n

The eyebrow raising promotion echoes how Musk empowered a handful of extremely young employees at DOGE<\/a>, 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<\/a>, and ran a company that reportedly helped a notorious cybercrime ring<\/a>. Another DOGE boy resigned \u2014 and then was rehired \u2014 after his incredibly racist tweets<\/a> came to light.<\/p>\n

Their young age and questionable backgrounds raised serious questions about Musk’s hiring choices, especially since these young individuals were often being given unprecedented access to sensitive federal systems and data<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

And the AI model in question in this case is Grok, which is integrated into X-formerly-Twitter, where its users frequently summon the chatbot to explain current events. Grok has a history of wildly going off the rails, including espousing claims of “white genocide<\/a>” in unrelated discussions, and in one of the most spectacular meltdowns in the AI industry, going around styling itself as “MechaHitler<\/a>.” Meanwhile, its creator Musk has repeatedly spoken about “fixing” Grok<\/a> after instances of the AI citing sources that contradict his worldview.<\/p>\n

It’s a fair question to ask if an a extremely young hire will be suited to keep Musk’s worst instincts in check, as well as help fine-tune a bot that keeps producing egregious outbursts. The person he replaced, according to BI<\/i>, joined the team after working in a management role at a Tesla data annotation crew for over a decade.<\/p>\n

Moreover, it’s worth noting that Musk has a history of choosing to surround himself with yes-men and sycophants. Pasini,\u00a0who attended the University of Pennsylvania but is currently “on leave” according to his LinkedIn, was hired in January after winning an xAI Hackathon in San Francisco. Then in early September, Musk began following Pasini on Twitter right after he made a tweet defending his new employer, according to\u00a0BI<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“Any person with half a brain knows that all of Elon’s companies are in their infancy,” Pasini wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Probably true,” Musk replied.<\/p>\n

The young gun is already acting as a hatchet man.<\/p>\n

Last week, at least nine high-level employees had their work accounts on Slack, an online collaboration platform, deactivated, BI<\/em> previously reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath, Pasini took charge. Since then, he’s led “rapid-fire one-on-one meetings at which employees have been asked to explain their work at the company,” nearly a dozen current and former employees told BI<\/i>. This sounds an awful like how Musk’s DOGE told federal employees that they had to send a groveling email explaining what work they did<\/a> or get fired.<\/p>\n

Per the reporting, Pasini also announced on Slack that employees will take tests to determine their future position at the company.<\/p>\n

His promotion hasn’t been well received by all. Two employees spoke critically about him on Slack, including questioning his credentials, screenshots showed. Hours later, both of their accounts were deactivated.<\/p>\n

More on Elon Musk: <\/strong>Tesla Engineer Quits, Roasts Elon Musk in Spectacular Fashion<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The post Elon Musk Fires 500 Staff at xAI, Puts College Kid in Charge of Training Grok<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Remember when Elon Musk hired a bunch of youngsters to gut the federal government? Well, now he’s put one in charge of a key division at his company xAI. Business…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182,177,178,184,187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai-chatbots","category-artificial-intelligence","category-elon-musk","category-grok","category-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}