Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI is hiring AI instructors for data annotation to train language algorithms. xAI is closely affiliated with X, formerly known as Twitter, which has seen a decline in users and a withdrawal of advertising. xAI is moving its data center to Memphis, raising concerns about contamination. .
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Elon Musk’s new AI company is rushing to hire a new type of data annotator.
Last week, xAI posted multiple job openings for “AI tutors.”
“As an AI Tutor, you will be responsible for consistently producing high-quality, accurately labeled data through a variety of methods that facilitate the training of natural language processing algorithms.Working closely with technical staff, you will Model training, benchmarking, and overall progress,” one post said.
Separate data labeling job postings include Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, German, Russian, Italian, French, Arabic, Indonesian, Turkish, Hindi, Persian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. The need for bilingual AI instructors who specialize in these languages is clearly stated.
Compensation for the remote, full-time, six-month contract job was listed as starting at $35 to $65 an hour. According to a LinkedIn analysis by Business Insider, multiple AI instructors started their jobs in August and September.
Since xAI’s launch in July 2023, Musk, who also heads SpaceX and Tesla, has pushed the startup to rapidly develop AI and advance “our collective understanding of the universe.” This includes launching its own generative AI program called Grok on Musk’s social media site X (formerly Twitter).
Musk has previously said that “public tweets” will be used for data training, and X has changed its user privacy policy to allow the site’s data to be used to train AI models.
The company isn’t the first Silicon Valley startup to rapidly hire data annotators in languages other than English. According to a report by Rest of World, Scale AI posted more than 60 job postings in languages such as Bengali and Urdu last year. These languages are underrepresented on the internet and less common in written form, so additional data is required to train language models at scale.
X could help improve Grok’s LLM with a continuously updated data feed, although it does see a decline in active users. According to Sensor Tower data from September, the number of daily active users of the X Global mobile app was down 15% from a year earlier, and down 28% from October 2022, around the time Musk acquired the company.
Major advertisers such as Disney and Apple also halted spending after Musk’s content moderation declined after he espoused anti-Semitic views. In August, X suspended its operations in Brazil, its sixth-largest and primarily Portuguese-speaking user base, after several legal battles related to disinformation and censorship.
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In September, xAI also brought a new supercomputer online called Colossus. The Memphis-based supercomputer is powered by 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised its rapid development.
According to a report from NPR, Musk moved xAI’s main operations to OpenAI’s old offices in San Francisco, but Colossus’ expansion in Memphis raised concerns about the impact of environmental contamination on the local community. According to a public request obtained by Forbes, xAI met privately with government officials and requested a non-disclosure agreement to move its data center to Memphis.
xAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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