Elon Musk’s xAI is on a hiring spree for ‘AI tutors’

Elon Musk, founder of xAI.

Elon Musk’s new AI company is on a hiring spree for a new type of data annotator.

Last week, xAI listed multiple job postings for “AI Tutors.”

“As an AI Tutor, you will be responsible for generating consistently high-quality and accurately labeled data through various methods to facilitate the training of natural language processing algorithms. Collaborating closely with the technical staff, you will create datasets for model training, benchmarking, and overall advancement,” one posting said.

Another data labeling job posting specified the need for bilingual AI tutors who specialize in languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, German, Russian, Italian, French, Arabic, Indonesian, Turkish, Hindi, Persian, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Compensation for the remote, full-time, six-month contract jobs was listed starting at $35-65 an hour. Multiple AI Tutors started their jobs in August and September, according to a LinkedIn analysis by B-17.

Since xAI’s launch in July 2023, Musk, who also heads SpaceX and Tesla, has pushed for the startup to rapidly develop AI and advance the “collective understanding of the universe.” This includes launching its own generative AI program called Grok on the social media site X (formerly known as Twitter), which Musk owns.

Musk has previously said that “public tweets” would be used for data training, and X changed its user privacy policy to allow the site’s data to be used to train AI models.

The company isn’t the first Silicon Valley startup to rapidly hire data annotators for non-English languages. Last year, Scale AI posted more than 60 jobs for languages like Bengali and Urdu, Rest of World reported. These languages are underrepresented and less common in written form on the internet, therefore requiring additional data to train large language models.

X could help Grok improve its LLMs with a continuously updated data supply, although it’s seen a drop in active users. According to Sensor Tower data from September, the X global mobile app’s daily active users were down 15% year over year and down 28% compared to October 2022, around the time Musk acquired the company.

Major advertisers like Disney and Apple have also pulled spending away after Musk endorsed antisemitic views on X, which has seen reduced content moderation. In August, X briefly paused operations in Brazil, its sixth biggest and largely Portuguese-speaking user base, after several legal battles related to disinformation and censorship.

In September, xAI also brought online a new supercomputer called Colossus. The Memphis-based supercomputer operates using 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised its rapid development.

While Musk has moved xAI’s main operations into OpenAI’s old offices in San Francisco, Colossus’ expanded operations in Memphis raised concerns about the impact of environmental pollution on local communities, NPR reported. According to public requests obtained by Forbes, xAI privately met with government officials and required non-disclosure agreements to bring its data center to Memphis.

xAI did not respond to a request for comment from B-17.