Inside xAI's tumultuous month: Workers locked out of Slack, a 'chaotic' all-hands meeting, and waves of job cuts (www.businessinsider.com)

xAI's Human Data operation has endured a chaotic week: after an all‑hands on Sept. 15 in which annotation‑team head Diego Pasini promised 10% raises and a plan to expand specialty annotators "10x," the company then cut hundreds more people—part of at least 500 layoffs already reported—some notified by being locked out of Slack within 20–30 minutes. The cuts followed a leadership exodus beginning Sept. 5, one‑on‑one reviews, and last‑minute subject‑matter tests that decided who stayed and who moved into new specialist roles. xAI simultaneously posted job listings for higher‑paid specialist roles (pay rising from roughly $35–$65/hr to $45–$100/hr) on topics like Memes, Personality & Behavior, STEM, finance and a small politics team, and publicly said it was “hiring like crazy.” For the AI community this matters because data annotators are central to training and fine‑tuning Grok; rapid churn, mass lockouts and morale collapse risk disrupting data pipelines, labeling consistency, safety moderation and long‑running evaluation regimes. The shift from generalists to higher‑paid specialists could improve topical expertise but creates coverage gaps during transitions and raises questions about continuity on safety and content‑policy labeling—especially after reports that some tests exposed annotators to graphic material. The turmoil highlights a common scaling tension: aggressive role restructuring and hiring promises can destabilize the human data operations that underpin model quality and trust.