Tianyi Zhang, the head of xAI's search and factual post-training team, announced his departure on X (formerly Twitter) today. Over the past year, he led the development of Grok's real-time search and agent features. His core mission was ensuring Grok could accurately retrieve information from X's massive, real-time stream of fragmented content without being misled by rumors and producing "hallucinations." This was the technical backbone of what he called Grok's "instant mode."
https://twitter.com/mycharmspace/status/2054724621677818136
Zhang's exit is just the latest in a wave of departures from xAI. According to Fast Company, roughly 80 people have left the lab in the past year. More strikingly, the founding team is now completely gone: besides Elon Musk, all co-founders who started the company — including Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and others — have left. Several newer executives, including the CFO and head of infrastructure, have also recently departed.
Musk previously responded by calling it a restructuring to "increase execution speed," likening it to the early days of Tesla, which he described as "tear down and rebuild."