xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, announced a significant strategic shift, revealing plans to expand its "Specialist AI tutor team by 10x" across diverse fields such as STEM, finance, medicine, and safety. This announcement, made via a post on X, comes on the heels of the company reportedly laying off at least 500 "generalist AI tutors" from its data annotation team. The move underscores xAI's accelerated focus on developing "truth-seeking AGI."
The layoffs, which impacted approximately a third of xAI's data annotation workforce, were communicated to employees via email on Friday night, September 12, 2025. Internal messages, reviewed by Business Insider, stated, "After a thorough review of our Human Data efforts, we've decided to accelerate the expansion and prioritization of our specialist AI tutors, while scaling back our focus on general AI tutor roles." Affected workers were informed their access to company systems would be terminated immediately, though they would receive pay through their contract end or November 30.
The data annotation team, previously xAI's largest unit, played a crucial role in training Grok, the company's flagship AI chatbot, by categorizing and contextualizing raw data. The transition signals a pivot towards more domain-specific expertise, aiming to enhance Grok's accuracy, safety, and overall capabilities. This strategic restructuring is intended to accelerate the development of xAI's artificial general intelligence.
xAI's mission, as articulated by Musk, is to "understand the true nature of the universe" and build a "maximally truth-seeking AI." The company positions itself as a rival to industry giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, emphasizing a commitment to truth over political correctness. The newly prioritized specialist AI tutors will be tasked with providing high-quality inputs, labels, and annotations, including text, audio, and video data, to refine xAI's advanced AI models.
The company's social media post explicitly called for new hires, stating, "> Specialist AI tutors at xAI are adding huge value. We will immediately surge our Specialist AI tutor team by 10x! We are hiring across domains like STEM, finance, medicine, safety, and many more. Come join us to help build truth-seeking AGI!" This aggressive hiring drive in specialized areas highlights xAI's intent to deepen Grok's understanding and performance in complex, nuanced fields.