Xai plans to add thousands of “AI tutors” this year, three employees told Bi. The company currently employs more than 900 tutors working on training Grok, the Xai chatbot. AI Arms Race.
Xai plans to hire thousands of people this year to help train chatbot Grok, three employees told Business Insider.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company has five job listings for data annotation roles, seeking bilingual workers and legal and STEM experts. The employee said the manager told him about hiring ramp-ups.
Xai employs over 900 data annotators, and according to the company’s internal tally, it is called an “AI tutor.” Six current and former employees said they brought hundreds of private tutors in preparation for the November presidential election. Business Insider first reported that Xai was strengthening employment in October last year.
Workers asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from experts.
Musk has repeatedly highlighted the possibilities of AI, and he used his startup to challenge the industry’s war on funding, talent and power. The company built what Musk called the world’s largest supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee last year, and launched Grok as the Stand-Alone app in January. Xai said the company raised $6 billion in its latest funding round.
On Monday, Musk and the investor group submitted a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that manages Openai. CEO Sam Altman said the company was “not for sale.”
A representative of Xai did not respond to requests for comment.
In the daily work of Xai private tutor
Data annotators play an important role in the development of large-scale language models. Tell chatbots like Grok to understand the world by labeling, classifying, and contextualizing raw data.
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The tutors have worked on various Xai projects, including improving Grok’s ability to generate images. To understand voice commands, they record themselves in a noisy environment and analyze chatbot transcriptions. Three workers said the company is working to expand its staff pool where Grok can train in a variety of languages.
Additionally, four workers said the tutors are focused on teaching Grok to provide understanding, summary and context for X’s posts and images (Xai updated it in December). )
“Sometimes the project takes months, sometimes it’s days, then you get a message from the team and move on to a new project,” one worker said. “Sometimes, it’s a drop situation.”
At Xai, teachers operate on a six-month contract as full-time hourly employees, according to job openings and conversations with workers. They work in conjunction with engineers, but the data annotator uses a different slack called TeachX, and according to six current and former employees, there are different email domains.
Within TeachX, AI tutors are divided into several specialized groups, including a much larger group of common AI tutors, such as STEM, coding, and translation.
The job listing shows that workers can earn between $35 and $65 per hour and can be promoted to team lead roles in a few months.
Six current and former workers are working from home, with most tutors working from home, allowing workers to predict how long they will spend on each task, monitor screen time and assess quality assurance workers. It said it is being supervised using a system. Their work. According to three employees, workers usually take between 3 and 10 minutes on a specific task.
Four workers said tutors were asked to justify their choices and could mark down if quality assurance workers disagree with them.
“Starfleet is primarily a way to make sure we’re not moving very quickly,” one worker said. “Sometimes, it can become monotonous, or you can paralyze between prompts.”
Data annotators are important for the tech industry
AI tutors seem to make up a large part of Xai’s workforce. A review of the LinkedIn profile suggests that the company has around 100 non-contract employees, including engineers and technical staff.
Unlike most AI companies that often use third-party employment agencies, Xai directly hires US tutors. Otto Kessi, a labor economist at Oxford University, said the model would allow the company to have more control over the work of tutors and provide greater data security.
Xai is far from the only company that leaned towards an army of data annotators.
Tesla, the electric car manufacturer at Musk, employs hundreds of in-house data annotators to train fully automated driving software. Companies such as Outlier.ai, Scale AI, Superannotate and Encord provide annotators to major technology companies such as Meta and Nvidia. Openai, which Musk discovered before resigning from the board in 2018, uses a third-party agency that can hire workers from developing countries.
“The most important thing is the amount of data,” Stefano Ermon, a generative AI expert at Stanford University, told BI. “We then need enough people to annotate that data.”
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