Elon Musk’s xAI has laid off at least 500 workers from its data annotation team, which helps develop the company’s Grok chatbot, Business Insider reported on Friday.

The company notified employees by email on Friday night that it was planning to downsize its team of generalist AI tutors, the report said, citing multiple messages viewed by Business Insider.

Responding to a request for comment, xAI referred to a post on X in which the company said it was hiring for roles across domains and planned to increase its specialist AI tutor team by “10X.”

The data annotation team, xAI’s largest, teaches Grok to understand the world by contextualising and categorising raw data, Business Insider said.