Yesterday, Benjamin De Kraker, a former xAI employee in its Human Data Team lost his job at the company. The intricate details regarding his abrupt departure from the AI firm are rather concerning.
The former XAI employee indicated in a long and detailed post on X (formerly Twitter) that his employer reached out to him and asked him to pull down a post listing the best AI platforms to use when coding. The list included a mention of xAI yet-to-be-released Grok 3 model, which seemingly caused the issue.
I resigned from xAI tonight. It makes me very sad, but was the right thing to do — and here’s why.xAI told me I either had to delete the post quoted below, or face being fired. After reviewing everything and thinking a lot, I’ve decided that I’m not going to delete the post… https://t.co/8egdL0c8gcFebruary 12, 2025
We live in a free world with freedom of speech and all that good stuff, or so they claim. According to De Kraker’s post:
“I resigned from xAI tonight. It makes me very sad, but was the right thing to do — and here’s why. xAI told me I either had to delete the post quoted below, or face being fired. 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. Why did they tell me to remove this opinion? Well, according to them, the reason is that I acknowledged that Grok 3… exists. I wish I was joking. I’m not. That’s the reason — the fact that I wrote “Grok 3 (TBD)” is grounds for being fired.”
Perhaps more concerning, Grok 3 existence wasn’t under NDA as the xAI had already acknowledged its development and existence before De Kraker’s opinion post on X:
“But wait, hasn’t Grok 3 been officially acknowledged by xAI? Yes. Yes it has. I’ll post below the official xAI blog post talking about Grok 3, along with many public Elon posts and video where it is repeatedly acknowledged. To be clear, the post they wanted me to remove is 100% just my personal opinion.”
However, the former xAI employee says he was issued a demand to pull down the post, categorically highlighting the mention of “Grok 3 – TBD” as confidential information. “Are they mad that my clearly-labeled opinion didn’t guess that the still-unreleased Grok 3 will be higher? Maybe,” he added. “Probably. Again, maybe it is at the top, I genuinely don’t know. That’s why it says “to be determined.”
Did Benjamin De Kraker break confidentiality?
The ranking currently (my opinion), for code:ChatGPT o1-proo1o3-mini(all kind of tied)Grok 3 (expected, tbd)Claude 3.5 SonnetDeepSeekGPT-4oGrok 2Gemini 2.0 Pro Series (might be higher, will probably move up)February 8, 2025
Amid the chaos, the former employee seemingly hinted at a “very cool” feature he’d been working on. However, he didn’t disclose more information about the feature, indicating “that would be **actual** confidential information. (Maybe after it comes out.)”
Perhaps more interestingly, xAI CEO Elon Musk responded to DeKraker’s post on X announcing his resignation from the company, commenting: “That’s weird.”
This news comes after Elon Musk seemingly attempted to acquire OpenAI for a cool $97.4 billion. However, his offer was quickly turned down by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who categorically indicated that the company and its mission weren’t for sale. Altman responded to Musk’s bid with an offer to acquire X for $9.74 billion while referring to Musk’s antics as the latest episode in his quest to slow down OpenAI’s advances.
For context, OpenAI’s last funding round pushed its market cap well beyond $157 billion. And as it happens, it’s reportedly in discussions to hold another funding round, which could push the ChatGPT maker’s market cap to $340 billion, stacking miles ahead of Musk’s offer.
