Elon Musk's xAI restructures engineering team before SpaceX IPO

Elon Musk's xAI is becoming more integrated with SpaceX as the notable space company's IPO approaches, prompting another significant restructure of its engineering team, as noted in a memo reviewed by Business Insider.

SpaceX exec Michael Nicholls noted the company is "lagging behind" its competitors and is working to close the gap swiftly.

Nicholls, who is now the president of xAI and Starlink's senior vice president at SpaceX, was informed about the role change by someone familiar with the company's internal matters, as reported by Business Insider.

SpaceX, which took over xAI this year, is likely to initiate a public offering soon, potentially valuing it above $2 trillion, according to some estimations.

As xAI integrates with SpaceX, it has seen multiple organizational changes while attempting to keep up with AI competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. 

The company has experienced the departure of some key cofounders and senior leaders, including Ross Nordeen, who was previously a close associate of Musk.

Currently, Musk is utilising the Tesla strategy to rebuild the enterprise from scratch, despite dealing with ongoing exits and job cuts. The pressure is high as xAI moves towards a potential multi-trillion-dollar IPO.

Devendra Chaplot, who formerly worked as a researcher at Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs and joined xAI last month, will manage pre-training, the initial step where a model learns general patterns from extensive datasets, like text or images.

Aman Madaan will be responsible for the model factory and tooling, covering infrastructure, data pipelines, and training processes essential in developing and enhancing AI models. 

Aditya Gupta will oversee post-training and reinforcement learning, the concluding phase where models are fine-tuned and aligned with user preferences for applications like chat or coding help.

Beibin Li, with prior experience at Microsoft and Meta as a researcher, will lead Grok Code's post-training. 

Xuhui Jia, who formerly worked at Google DeepMind, along with Yukun Zhu, will be in charge of training for videos and images.

The company’s product division will be led by Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg. These engineers joined from AI coding leader Cursor in March. This team will manage Grok Main, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine.

Jake Palmer will oversee physical infrastructure, while Daniel Dueri will handle compute infrastructure, as he serves as the director of software engineering at SpaceX, per LinkedIn. 

Other SpaceX staff have also assumed leadership roles. Matt Monson, director of Starlink software at SpaceX, will lead data efforts at xAI.

On the compute side, Nicholls mentioned in an internal memo that xAI's training efficiency is "woefully low," with plans to enhance it significantly within two months.

Musk initially restructured the company back in February after SpaceX absorbed xAI. 

Since January, eight engineers who originally helped establish the company with Musk have left, amongst them cofounders Nordeen, Guodong Zhang, and Manuel Kroiss, who led Grok Code, and Toby Pohlen, who assisted in leading Macrohard, the company's AI agent initiative.

Due to the departure of cofounders, the company's structure has been in constant flux, often with Musk personally overseeing numerous direct reports. 

Engineers from Tesla and SpaceX have been working at the Palo Alto office of the company to help implement the changes, according to sources.

In March, Musk mentioned on X that "xAI was not established correctly initially, hence it's being overhauled from the basics."

He also noted that the company is revisiting previous applicants to recruit new talent.