#xai

#xai

The NAACP filed a lawsuit against xAI last month for operating dozens of unregulated gas turbines that worsen air quality in one of the most polluted parts of the country. The organization has sought an injunction against xAI's use of the turbines. So far, xAI has been granted permits for 15 turbines. As of a few weeks ago, it was using 46.

xAI has added a further 19 natural gas turbines to its Southhaven, Mississippi-based AI data center site. This is despite an ongoing lawsuit alleging the company was already operating 27 unpermitted methane gas generators to power the nearby Colossus 2 campus in South Memphis, which it uses to train its Grok AI assistant.

The new XChat app offers many of the elements of modern messaging X had already introduced to its chats feature, like the ability to delete and edit messages, block screenshots and send disappearing messages.

To answer that question, our resident RPG-enthusiast Ram Iyer put together a set of five general questions about Baldur's Gate, which we ran against xAI and the three major models in a kind of quasi-benchmark that I've decided to call BaldurBench. In the interest of journalistic transparency, I've made all the chat transcripts public, so you can see them here: Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

"This investment reflects HUMAIN's conviction in transformational AI and our ability to deploy meaningful capital behind exceptional opportunities where long-term vision, technical excellence, and execution converge, xAI's trajectory, further strengthened by its acquisition by SpaceX, one of the largest technology mergers on record, represents the kind of high-impact platform we seek to support with significant capital" HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin stated.

The rivalry between xAI and OpenAI is heating up again - this time, over wood-fired pizza. Over the weekend, Elon Musk and an OpenAI engineer jockeyed on X about wood-fired crusts, dough fermentation, and campus chefs. On its face, it was a lighthearted back-and-forth about free pizza for lunch. Underneath, it encapsulates a trend playing out in Silicon Valley: rival AI companies are publicly pitching culture - and perks like free lunch - in the talent war for top engineers.

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI is facing a second lawsuit alleging it is illegally emitting toxic pollutants from its enormous datacenters, which house its supercomputers and run the chatbot Grok. The new pending suit alleges xAI is violating the Clean Air Act and was filed Friday by the storied civil rights group the NAACP. The group's 40-page notice of intent to sue alleges xAI has been polluting Black communities near its facility in Southaven, Mississippi.

Elon Musk's bankers are looking to trim the debt that xAI has taken on over the past few years, following the company's merger with SpaceX, a new report from Bloomberg says. xAI has built up $18 billion in debt over the past few years, with some of this being attributed to the purchase of social media platform Twitter (now X) and the creation of the AI development company. Bankers are trying to create some kind of financing plan that would trim "some of the heavy interest costs" that come with the debt. The financing deal would help trim some of the financial burden that is currently present ahead of the plan to take SpaceX public sometime this year.

The past few days have been a wild ride for xAI, which is racking up staff and cofounder departure announcements left and right. On Tuesday and Wednesday, cofounder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced his departure and that it was "time for [his] next chapter," with cofounder Jimmy Ba following with a similar post later that day, writing that it was "time to recalibrate [his] gradient on the big picture."

On its own, it's a pretty standard tech departure announcement - but it's part of a troubling pattern for the lab. Five members of the company's 12-person founding team have now left the company, with four of the departures coming in just the last year. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic left for OpenAI in mid-2024, followed by Google veteran Christian Szegedy in February 2025.