Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has laid off around 500 employees from its data annotation team, according to a report by Business Insider. The move, communicated late on Friday evening, affects workers who were responsible for training the company’s generative AI chatbot, Grok.

xAI lays off 500 data annotation staff

As per the report, in an email sent to staff, xAI said it was reducing its focus on developing general AI tutors and would instead concentrate resources on specialist AI tutors. “After a thorough review of our Human Data efforts, we’ve decided to accelerate the expansion and prioritisation of our specialist AI tutors, while scaling back our focus on general AI tutor roles,” the message stated. “As part of this shift in focus, we no longer need most generalist AI tutor positions and your employment with xAI will conclude.”

Employees were told their system access would be revoked immediately. However, salaries would continue to be paid until the end of their contracts or until 30 November, adds the report.

Expansion of specialist AI roles

The company has reportedly made clear it is ramping up investment in specialist AI tutors across fields such as video games, web design, data science, medicine, and STEM. On 13 September, xAI announced plans to expand this team tenfold, saying the roles were “adding huge value”.

Notably, the layoffs follow recent reports that senior members of the data annotation team had their Slack accounts deactivated before the formal announcement was made.

In other news, earlier this month, Musk once again put the spotlight on artificial intelligence, as he highlighted the predictive abilities of X’s AI chatbot, Grok. On his official X account, the billionaire shared a link to a live benchmark platform, urging users to test Grok’s forecasting prowess.

In his first tweet, Musk wrote, “Download the @Grok app and try Grok Expert mode. For serious predictions, Grok Heavy is the best.” He followed up with, “The ability to predict the future is the best measure of intelligence.”

The link pointed to FutureX, a platform designed to evaluate how well large language models (LLMs) can predict real-world events. Developed by Jiashuo Liu and collaborators, FutureX presents AI agents with tasks spanning politics, economics, sports and cultural trends, scoring their predictions in real time.

As we all know, there’s a lot of talk about AI lately. Some of it is pretty hyped-up (“it will be a disaster!” vs. “heaven is just around the corner!”), but IO+ is here to select the pearls from the rubbish. Pearl of the week is the interview Carlo van de Weijer had with the Possible Futures Podcast. Van de Weijer is basically optimistic, but with a realistic perspective. “Technology has always been the main thing that saves our future,” he argues. “Every breakthrough created new problems, but also the tools to solve them.”

AI won’t change the basics of human life, Van de Weijer expects. “It won’t rewrite the rhythms of human existence. It just makes them smoother.” Still, he warns against complacency. “AI is like fire. Fire gave us warmth and cooking, but it could also burn down your house. The difference is that AI moves much faster and can continually improve itself. That’s why we need regulation.” Van de Weijer also discusses jobs lost & found, increased productivity, and its impact on education. More here.

ASML

The news leaked on Sunday afternoon and was made official on Wednesday: ASML has acquired more than 10% of the French AI company Mistral for €1.3 billion. Hardware is embracing software; iron into AI. We were on top of it with the first news, the nuances from ASML itself, and an analysis of this rather surprising move. We highly recommend the analysis, in which we present the eight most important arguments to show that this seemingly illogical step is actually very logical. “Strategically brilliant,” even, as we heard from ASML itself.

Officially, the goal of this “strategic partnership” is to explore the use of AI models in ASML’s product portfolio and in research, development, and operations. Simply put, it will enhance ASML’s large machines, making them better and more reliable, as well as the research that will lead to the successors of these mega-devices. But that’s not all, because… well, read for yourself 🙂

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The Gerard & Anton monthly newsletter is a great way to get a flavor of one of the most active startup ecosystems in Europe. It follows raw ideas (via Drinks, Pitches & Demos), bold visions (via Brabant Bits & Bytes), early successes (via the G&A Awards), lifetime achievements (via the Piek Awards), and all other reasons to celebrate (via the Founders Dinner, a.o.). In addition to all that, Gerardanton.com/news provides your daily update on relevant developments in the ecosystem.

Watt Matters in AI

We are approaching November 26, the day we will be holding our Watt Matters in AI conference. Everything about the exorbitant energy consumption of AI systems, but above all: what solutions are there to prevent this from getting completely out of hand? We have now secured seven very interesting speakers: a guarantee that by the end of the day you will be completely up to speed on this topic. Tickets are available via Watt Matters in AI.

A podcast every day

We’ll keep saying it: every morning at 6:30 a.m. (on weekdays), a new podcast is waiting for you. In it, our AI colleagues Oliver and Shelby discuss the two most interesting topics of the day. This makes the IO+ Daily the ideal way to fill your head with some optimistic news from the world of innovation and technology.

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