PANews reported on September 14th that according to Zhitong Finance, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI laid off 500 team members on Friday evening. The email announced the company's immediate "strategic shift," deciding to "accelerate and prioritize the expansion of our specialized AI mentor team while reducing our focus on general AI mentor positions." "As part of this refocus, we no longer need most of our general AI mentor positions, and your employment with xAI will be terminated," xAI wrote in the email. Business Insider believes the layoffs represent approximately one-third of xAI's 1,500-person data annotation team, which primarily handles the annotation and pre-processing of data used to train xAI's chatbot, Grok.