The xAI exodus: Another cofounder gone, and one more has told people he's leaving

• Zihang Dai left xAI this week, and Guodong Zhang is expected to depart in the coming days, insiders say.
• Zhang oversaw the company's coding agent and its video and image generation tool.
• After the departures, only two of the engineers who cofounded the company with Elon Musk will remain.

The exodus of cofounders from Elon Musk's AI startup continues.

Zihang Dai left xAI earlier this week, according to people familiar with the matter. His xAI badge has vanished from his X profile.

Meanwhile, Guodong Zhang has told people he plans to leave in the coming days, insiders said. His X profile still has an xAI badge.

This follows the recent exits of a string of xAI cofounders, including Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang, all of whom have left since January.

After Dai and Zhang depart, only two of the 11 people who started the company with Musk in 2023 — Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen — will remain.

Zhang reports directly to Musk and led two of the company's key projects: Grok Code and Grok Imagine. He was given a larger role at xAI earlier this year, shortly before Wu left the company, Business Insider previously reported.

On Wednesday, Musk told the Abundance Conference that "Grok is currently behind in coding."

"The reason I was late for this was that I was just in a giant sort of all-hands on coding, going through all the things that need to happen to essentially exceed our competitors on coding, which I think we'll do," he said.

Before joining xAI, Zhang worked at Google DeepMind and received his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Dai was a member of technical staff at the company. He worked at Google and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University prior to helping found xAI.

Reached by phone, Zhang and Dai declined to comment. A spokesperson for xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company has shed dozens of employees since January. Musk announced he reorganized xAI last month and parted ways with some staffers as a result. Some of the cuts have impacted workers on the company's AI white collar project, Macrohard, and Grok Imagine, its AI image and video generator, Business Insider previously reported.

"Because we've reached a certain scale, we're organizing the company to be more effective at this scale. And actually, when this happens, there's some people who are better suited for the early stages of a company and less suited for the later stages," Musk said during the February all-hands event, which was later posted on X.

Zhang is one of a handful of xAI leaders who presented at the all-hands.

The reorganization took place shortly after two of Musk's direct reports, Wu and Ba, left the company and xAI was acquired by Musk's rocket company, SpaceX. The company is reportedly gearing up for an initial public offering this year that could value SpaceX at $1.5 trillion.

Less than three weeks after the reorg, Pohlen, who led Macrohard, announced he'd left the company. Business Insider reported this week that the project has since stalled at xAI, and Musk said on X that that xAI is now working with Tesla on it.

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