Elon Musk's XAI put a college student in charge of the team training Grok amid sweeping layoffs (www.businessinsider.com)

xAI abruptly placed Diego Pasini—a 2023 high‑school grad who joined the company in January after winning an xAI hackathon and is listed as "on leave" from the University of Pennsylvania—into leadership of the data annotation team that trains Grok. The move came amid sweeping September shakeups: multiple senior staff had Slack accounts deactivated, roughly 500 team members were cut on Sept. 12 (with more than 100 let go afterward), and headcount fell from about 1,500 to ~900. Pasini led an all‑hands saying there were no further planned layoffs, while the team ran rapid one‑on‑one reviews and tests to determine who would remain. For the AI/ML community this matters because data annotation is the backbone of supervised learning—labeling, categorizing and contextualizing raw inputs directly affects model accuracy, safety, bias mitigation, and downstream performance. Rapid staff churn, mass testing, and a leadership shift from a decade‑experienced manager to a young, short‑tenured lead risk disrupting annotation standards, institutional knowledge, and quality control for Grok’s training pipeline. The episode also highlights broader governance and operational risks at fast‑moving AI labs: personnel instability can introduce dataset drift, inconsistent labeling guidelines, and potential compliance gaps that materially affect model behavior.