On Wednesday, xAI took the unusual step of publishing a full 45-minute recording of an all-hands meeting on X, making it publicly available. Details of the Tuesday night meeting had been previously reported by The New York Times, which may have influenced xAI’s decision to release the video. The full recording reveals significant new information about Elon Musk’s plans for the artificial intelligence lab, including its product roadmap and its ongoing connections to the X platform.
The most immediate revelation concerned a series of departing employees. Musk described these as layoffs resulting from a changing organizational structure at the company. While reorganizations are common, the scope of the departures has caused considerable confusion, particularly as it involved losing a significant portion of the founding team. Musk stated that as a company grows, especially as rapidly as xAI, its structure must evolve, which unfortunately required parting ways with some individuals.
The new organizational system divides xAI into four primary teams. One team is focused on the Grok chatbot, including its voice features. Another team works on the app’s coding system. A third team is dedicated to the Imagine video generator. Finally, a team is focused on the Macrohard project, which ranges from simulating simple computer use to modeling entire corporations. A leader of the Macrohard project told colleagues that the system should be capable of doing anything on a computer that a computer can do, suggesting future applications like AI-designed rocket engines.
The all-hands meeting also featured claims about new usage and revenue figures for xAI and X. Executives stated that X had just crossed one billion dollars in annual recurring revenue from subscriptions, attributed to a holiday marketing push. Additionally, executives said xAI’s Imagine tool is generating 50 million videos per day and more than 6 billion images over the past 30 days, according to internal metrics.
However, it is difficult to separate those figures from the flood of deepfake pornography that overtook X during that same period. The platform saw engagement skyrocket as AI-generated explicit images became more prevalent. With an estimated 1.8 million sexualized images generated over just nine days, the image-generation figures likely include substantial amounts of this controversial content.
The most eye-catching part of the presentation came at the end, when Musk emphasized the importance of space-based data centers despite the significant technical challenges. Musk went even further, envisioning a moon-based factory for AI satellites. This would include a lunar mass driver, essentially an electromagnetic catapult, to launch them. With such infrastructure, Musk said one could launch an AI cluster capable of capturing significant portions of the sun’s total energy output or even expanding to other galaxies. Musk concluded that while it is difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, it will be incredibly exciting to see it happen.