Elon Musk's AI company xAI is once again facing significant personnel changes. The company's last co-founder, Tony Wu, has recently left, marking the complete departure of xAI's original founding team less than three years after its establishment. Tony Wu was previously in charge of model architecture and core algorithm development at xAI and was once a star engineer at Google DeepMind.

All Founding Members Have Left: Vision Disagreements or Big Tech Recruitment?

xAI was founded in 2023, initially consisting of 12 top experts from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. However, as the project progressed, founding members have been leaving one by one for various reasons. Although Tony Wu's specific next steps remain undisclosed, it is speculated that this may be related to xAI's intense work culture or lucrative offers from other AI giants such as OpenAI or Anthropic. This continuous loss of key talent has raised doubts about whether Elon Musk can maintain the technical continuity of xAI.

Elon Musk Takes Charge: Will the Iteration of Grok Be Affected?

Despite the departure of all co-founders, Elon Musk does not seem to be slowing down xAI. Currently, xAI is pouring resources into developing its next-generation large model Grok-3 and continues to expand its supercomputer cluster in Memphis. Elon Musk emphasized on social media that xAI has already attracted a new batch of outstanding engineers from Tesla and SpaceX. However, the "total elimination" of the founding team remains a heavy blow to a startup, especially at a time when competition in the underlying architecture of large models is intensifying. The lack of experienced "elders" could increase the uncertainty of Grok catching up with GPT-5.