The irony: xAI engineer fired by Elon Musk after posting about Grok

Benjamin De Kraker, a former employee of xAI, has resigned after a disagreement with the company over a post he shared about AI model rankings.

In the original post, De Kraker listed his personal opinion on the top models for coding, including ChatGPT o1-pro, o1, and o3-mini, followed by Grok 3 (which he noted was “to be determined”), Claude 3.5 Sonnet, DeepSeek, GPT-4o, Grok 2, and Gemini 2.0 Pro Series.

Then, xAI asked De Kraker to remove the post, claiming that mentioning Grok 3, even with the “TBD” label, was a breach of confidentiality. However, Grok 3 had already been publicly acknowledged by the company and its CEO, Elon Musk.

De Kraker, who felt the post was harmless and clearly labeled as his personal opinion, refused to comply with the request.

In his resignation statement, De Kraker expressed disappointment with the company’s approach, particularly as it claimed to support free speech and openness. He criticized xAI for trying to control personal opinions and suppress free expression.

“The entire situation has been very strange. I thought about just deleting the damn thing…. But you know, once you start caving and giving up holding mild personal opinions, the slope becomes very slippery,” he mentions.

Musk previously purchased X, formerly Twitter, back in 2022 with $44 billion to take the company private and “protect free speech.”

But, his reign is facing criticism right and left due to concerns about content moderation, the mass layoffs that followed, a decrease in user engagement, and the platform’s shifting direction under his leadership.