xAI lays out interplanetary ambitions in public all-hands

Probably the most fast revelation involved a string of departing staff, which Musk described as layoffs ensuing from a altering organizational construction on the firm. Whereas reorganizations are frequent, the breadth of the departures has precipitated important confusion, notably because it has meant the lack of a good portion of the founding staff.

“As an organization grows, particularly as shortly as xAI, the construction should evolve,” Musk mentioned on X. “This sadly required parting methods with some individuals. We want them properly in future endeavors.”

The brand new organizational system splits xAI into 4 main groups: one centered on the Grok chatbot (together with voice), one other for the app’s coding system, one other for the Think about video generator, and at last a staff centered on the Macrohard venture, which spans from easy laptop use simulation to modeling total firms.

“[Macrohard] is ready to do something on a pc that a pc is ready to do,” Toby Pohlen, who will lead the venture beneath the brand new organizational construction, informed his colleagues. “There ought to be rocket engines totally designed by AI.”

The all-hands additionally featured claims about new utilization and income figures for xAI and X. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, mentioned X had “simply crossed” $1 billion in annual recurring income from subscriptions, which he attributed to a advertising and marketing push through the holidays.

Moreover, executives mentioned the xAI’s Think about device is producing 50 million movies a day, and greater than 6 billion photographs over the previous 30 days, based on their inside metrics.

Nevertheless it’s troublesome to separate these figures from the flood of deepfake pornography that overtook X throughout that very same interval. The X platform noticed engagement skyrocket as AI-generated express photographs grew to become extra prevalent, and with an estimated 1.8 million sexualized photographs generated over simply 9 days, the image-generation figures seemingly embrace substantial quantities of this controversial content material.

Probably the most eye-catching a part of the presentation got here on the finish, when Musk reemphasized the significance of space-based information facilities regardless of the technical challenges concerned. Musk went nonetheless additional, envisioning a moon-based manufacturing facility for AI satellites, together with a lunar mass driver — primarily an electromagnetic catapult — to launch them. With such infrastructure, Musk mentioned, one may launch an AI cluster able to capturing important parts of the solar’s whole vitality output and even increasing to different galaxies.

“It’s troublesome to think about what an intelligence of that scale would take into consideration,” Musk mentioned, “nevertheless it’s going to be extremely thrilling to see it occur.”