Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

Zigurd

Obviously catching up to others in agent assisted coding is the motivation for this. But it is also an odd decision in the same way that Meta hiring an AI leader from a data labeling company is odd.

rvz

Not even Elon believes that Cursor is worth $50B or even $29B.

dang

I couldn't find a working archive link for the ft.com article - anyone? Since it's the original source I've left it up, but added other URLs to the toptext.

dang

Recent, related, and apparently ahead of the curve: Ask HN: What Happened to xAI? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323236 - March 2026 (6 comments)

awestroke

@grok is this real? @grok fire the bottom 50% engineers from x.ai ranked by number of commits per day @grok generate a hypothetical picture of an Elon who is not under the influence of large amounts of Ketamine I honestly don't know what to expect from Elon these days. But it's rarely good news.

bearjaws

Feel like the canary was when Grokpedia became a project. Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward. I also keep hearing this narrative that Twitter is a good data source, but I cannot imagine it's a valuable dataset. Sure keeping up with realtime topics can be useful, but I am not sure how much of a product that is.

xnx

xAI's biggest contribution to the space seems to have been their x-rated image/video model. Hard to see what xAI has to offer against Gemini, Claud, ChatGPT.

heraldgeezer

I do use Grok as a chatbot sometimes. Very good for sourcing X and general web search. Not as "prude" as the others too.

fraywing

Grok's UVP is still nonconsensual porn, right?

mikkupikku

Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much time trying to make their model have an edgy cringe attitude, Idk.

dang

[stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ]

dang

All: please stick to thoughtful, substantive discussion. You may not owe you-know-whom better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. If you don't have a thoughtful, substantive comment to add, not commenting is also a good option. There are quite a few interesting submissions to talk about. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

measurablefunc

It's surprising that AI coding agents have network effects but it's true. Think about it from first principles & you'll realize that the bottleneck is how many people are using it to write real code & providing both implicit (compiler errors, test failures, crash logs, etc) & direct ("did not properly follow instructions", "deleted main databases", "didn't properly use a tool", etc) feedback. No one is using xAI for serious software engineering so that leaves OpenAI, Anthropic, & Google w/ enough scale to benefit from network effects. No one has real AI but what they do have is the appearance of intelligence from crowdsourced feedback & filtering. This means companies that are already in the lead will continue to stay there & xAI started way too late so they will continue to lose in every domain that actually matters & benefits from network effects.

stainablesteel

im not surprised, grok definitely falls behind as both a coding agent and a research tool. claude codes the best, gpt is the best research tool, and grok is really only great at videos. which isn't a huge loss, but videos don't have the same functional capacity as academic topics and coding

numbers_guy

Unfortunate. The Grok team built a phenomenal model. I use it all the time and it very often out performs GPT and Claude, on coding and STEM research related tasks. I was part of the beta for a while Grok 4.2 Beta with multi-agents and it was just amazingly good. People aren't using it for reasons other than its capabilities. I mean, I don't think my boss would approve a paid Grok subscription for example.

lvl155

xAI showed me that it’s really still OAI and Anthropic (which is basically the OG devs). No matter how much money you throw at the problem, the entire space is still in the hands of a few.

pelorat

This is veiled speak for "No one wants to work for us, so we need to contact rejected applicants to fill positions". I use AI for work, but not agentic, at most per method/function using GitHub CoPilot (which has Grok on it). Grok is at best useful for commenting code.

BigTTYGothGF

I feel like even just a couple years ago it would have been shocking to see an article involving Musk have this kind of spin. Like you'd never see a line like this: > The name is a “funny” reference to Microsoft, the billionaire added. in something from 2023 or earlier.

blueaquilae

Yes 11 up and everyone why free insult on a model that top adoption. Aligned with your personal view is not ahead of the curve, it's just personal.

teladnb

It does not surprise me. The free Grok got worse since 4.0, they increasingly save money by not responding at all or only allowing one answer. Grok now defends the administration and billionaires. The company seems to burn money like crazy. Everyone knows that "AI in space" and the downgrade to a moon trip after claiming for 15 years that Mars is just around the corner are marketing. All AIs are toys and the coding promises are just a lie to string along investors. Unfortunately many of these are senile Star Trek watchers who buy into everything.