Elon Musk's AI Startup Loses Engineer Over Social Media Post

An AI engineer at xAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk, has resigned after refusing to delete a social media post ranking AI models, including xAI’s upcoming Grok 3. Benjamin DeKraker, who had been working for the Human Data team building Grok models for six months, announced his untimely resignation on Feb. 12.

DeKraker’s decision followed a dispute over an X post, where he expressed his personal ranking of AI models based on their coding capabilities. In the post, he ranked the yet-to-be-released Grok 3 below several OpenAI ChatGPT models. xAI reportedly told him that the post contained confidential information and asked him to remove it.

“I either had to delete the post quoted below, or face being fired,” DeKraker wrote, adding: “After reviewing everything and thinking a lot, I’ve decided that I’m not going to delete the post -- which is very clearly a harmless personal opinion.”

Elon Musk previously promoted Grok 3, stating on Jan. 3 that pretraining for the model had been completed with “10X more compute than Grok 2.” According to DeKraker, the Musk-founded AI startup said that writing “Grok 3 - to be determined (TBD)” was considered leaking of “confidential information.”

The post they wanted me to remove is 100% just my personal opinion,” DeKraker said while explaining his decision to resign rather than delete a post on X. The social media platform has become known for its promotion of free speech since Musk bought it in 2022.

However, some community members sided with xAI, arguing that internal employees should not undermine a company’s unreleased products. xAI’s ultimatum to its employee for an X post comes amid a power struggle between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk.

On Feb. 10, a Musk-led group of investors reportedly offered $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI. In response, Altman refused and offered a counteroffer of $9.74 billion to buy X, which Musk had acquired in 2022 for $44 billion.