Nilay Patel

We'll be right back.

We're back with Verge Senior AI Reporter Hayden Field, talking about the wild state of the AI talent war.

Let me connect this to XAI, which has no trust and safety concerns whatsoever, as we have covered in great detail on the Verge and on Decoder.

At a high level, what's happening with XAI, Grok, and Elon?

He's merged XAI, and with it, the X platform into SpaceX.

I think it's very important for us to all take a beat and note that SpaceX now operates Twitter.

which is weird, but a lot of people got paid.

A bunch of people left.

There's some chaos and drama with them leaving.

What's going on there?

Let me push on that just a little bit.

There's the trust and safety part, which, you know, Grok, I think, should not have been undressing people all over the X platform or really on any platform.

But they allowed it to do that.

And it feels like most image generators –

could do that, and the safety guardrails were just built in at the beginning.

And Grok's innovation was not having the safety guardrails at all, so you could do bad things with it.

But the innovation that's driving all the money and the employee movement is, hey, look at this thing that an AI model can do.

Look at what Cloud Code can do.

Look at what OpenClaw can do.

If we use the models in different ways or we orchestrate them in different ways, these things can go be more agentic.