'Not built right the first time' -- Musk's xAI is starting over again, again
By Tim Fernholz
Published on March 14, 2026.
Elon Musk's deep learning lab, xAI, is undergoing a personnel overhaul to compete with other AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. The most immediate issue is competitive, with cofounders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang leaving the company after Musk complained that their AI coding tools were not effectively competing with Claude Code or Codex, rival programming assistants made by Anthropic or OpenAI, respectively. The company is now focusing on catching up by mid-year, with 11 senior engineers including two co-founders, including Musk, recently left the company. On the hiring front, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg are joining xAI from AI coding tool company Cursor. This indicates an increase in demand for direct access to the AI models xAI runs on. Meanwhile, Musk is focusing on the future of xAI's Macrohard project, which aims to create an AI agent capable of doing anything a white collar worker can do on a computer.
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