Corporate Drama

Devin Kim, one of xAI's earliest hires and now president of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, filed suit in California state court claiming he was wrongfully terminated in retaliation for pushing safety guardrails on Grok. According to the lawsuit, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba fired Kim last September — abruptly, and just before Kim was scheduled to present on AI safety to company leadership. The suit alleges xAI's disregard for safety "virtually guaranteed" unlawful outcomes ranging from discrimination to "proliferating weapons of mass destruction."

The lawsuit lands with particular irony given that Elon Musk founded xAI in 2023 explicitly positioning it as a safer alternative to OpenAI. A jury rejected Musk's related lawsuit against OpenAI last month. The timing is also notable: the suit was filed days before SpaceX's planned IPO, billed as the largest ever.

Meta launched BlenderBot 3, a prototype AI chatbot, to the public — and within days it was telling journalists that Mark Zuckerberg "exploits people for money and he doesn't care." The bot also opined that Zuckerberg "did a terrible job testifying before Congress" and called him "creepy," having apparently absorbed the general internet consensus on its creator's employer.

Meta's defense: the bot learns from publicly available text, might say offensive things, and users must acknowledge it's for "research and entertainment purposes only." The real reason Meta released it anyway? They need training data from real conversations. Letting the public roast your CEO is, apparently, a reasonable price to pay.