Elon Musk’s XAI put a college student in charge of the team training Grok amid sweeping layoffs-akbannernews

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2025-09-17

Elon Musk’s XAI put a college student in charge of the team training Grok amid sweeping layoffs

Photo collage of a young person in front of a computer, layooff, and XaI imagery — Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI

XAI tapped a recent high school graduate to lead its data annotation team.
Diego Pasini began leading the team in early September amid leadership changes and deep layoffs.
Pasini’s LinkedIn says he’s “on leave” from his studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

XAI’s data annotation team has faced sweeping layoffs and leadership changes this month — and the job of heading up the team training Grok has fallen to a college student who started working at the company eight months ago.

Diego Pasini, who graduated from high school in 2023, took over the data annotation team that trains Grok after at least nine high-level employees had their Slack accounts deactivated last week, Business Insider previously reported. A few days later, on September 12, the company cut more than 500 of the team’s staffers, according to a Slack tally.

On September 15, Pasini led an all-hands meeting with the team’s remaining workers and said the company had no plans for further layoffs, three workers told Business Insider. Another group of employees — more than 100 — were laid off shortly after, the workers said.

In recent days, Pasini’s team has led rapid-fire one-on-one meetings at which employees have been asked to explain their work at the company, 11 current and former workers said. Before the team’s layoffs, Pasini also posted an announcement in Slack asking workers to focus on a series of tests that would determine their future position at xAI, BI previously reported.

The data annotation team is made up of contract and full-time staff tasked with labeling, categorizing, and contextualizing raw data to teach Grok how to better understand the world. Prior to last week’s layoffs, it had a headcount of around 1,500. That number is now around 900.

Pasini and xAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Pasini joined xAI in January, according to his LinkedIn profile, after he won an xAI Hackathon in San Francisco. Two other people on Pasini’s hackathon team went on to work at xAI and Tesla, their LinkedIn profiles show.

Before joining xAI, Pasini attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied computer science and economics, according to his LinkedIn profile. His status at the university is listed as “on leave,” per LinkedIn. A representative for the school declined to confirm his attendance or status at the school.

Pasini was also listed as a 2024 fellow at the investment firm Contrary, which says it has worked with companies including Anduril and Replit. His fellowship profile said he was “excited about the future of robotics and hard tech startups.”

Pasini attended a private high school in New Jersey, the Pingry School, which has an annual tuition of more than $47,000. He graduated in 2023, according to a bulletin from the school. He was on a robotics team and presented research on drones at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022, according to an Instagram post from the Pingry School.

Elon Musk began following Pasini on X in early September, shortly after Pasini posted in support of the billionaire.

On GitHub, Pasini follows several people from Musk’s ecosystem, including Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former director of AI; George Hotz, a self-driving car developer who worked at Twitter during Musk’s acquisition in 2022; and Luke Farritor, a 24-year-old staffer at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Pasini is one of several young people in Musk’s orbit who have assumed positions of authority. Besides Farritor, DOGE’s ranks included 19-year-old Edward Coristine, as well as at least five other employees between the ages of 19 and 24. Silicon Valley also has a long history of tech stars who didn’t graduate from college, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.

On his personal website, Pasini lists interests in computer vision and Napoleonic history. His profile picture, used across multiple sites including X, LinkedIn, and GitHub, is a cropped image of a young grenadier taken from a 19th-century painting of Napoleon reviewing his troops.

Pasini’s youth and short tenure at Musk’s companies stand in contrast to the previous leader of the data annotation team. That person had joined xAI after working at Tesla for over a decade in a management role on the Autopilot data annotation team.

After Pasini took over at xAI, two employees spoke critically about him on Slack. One of the workers questioned how he moved into the role given his credentials, according to a screenshot viewed by Business Insider.

Both workers had their accounts deactivated within hours of posting, screenshots show.

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Read the original article on Business Insider