An AI engineer at Elon Musk-owned xAI has resigned after he claimed that he was asked to delete a post he says contained a “harmless personal opinion”, on X (formerly Twitter). Benjamin De Kraker said he was given an ultimatum: delete the tweet or be fired.
What was the post all about
The post in question is essentially a personal ranking of AI models, which included a mention of “Grok 3 (expected, tbd),” referring to xAI’s upcoming model.
The ranking currently (my opinion), for code:
ChatGPT o1-pro
o1
o3-mini
(all kind of tied)
Grok 3 (expected, tbd)
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
DeepSeek
GPT-4o
Grok 2
Gemini 2.0 Pro Series (might be higher, will probably move up)
What the xAI engineer said
Apart from giving the reason for his resignation in a long post, De Kraker claims xAI considered even this acknowledgment of Grok 3’s existence a violation of company policy. He further pointed out the absurdity of the situation, noting that both xAI and Musk had publicly discussed Grok 3’s development on numerous occasions, even sharing official posts about the model.
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.
But wait, hasn’t Grok 3 been officially acknowledged by xAI? Yes. Yes it has.
AI engineer takes swipe at Musk
De Kraker expressed disappointment that a company ostensibly championing free speech would take such action against an employee for a clearly labeled opinion.
“It’s very disappointing to me that a company and leaders who supposedly champion free speech and openness would try to fire a low-level employee over a clearly-labeled opinion that contains absolutely nothing controversial, but here we are,” he said.
Despite his frustration, De Kraker wished xAI and Musk well, praising the team he worked with. He mentioned a specific feature of Grok he worked on, expressing hope for its success, but declined to provide details, citing “actual confidential information.”