xAI asked employees for their tax returns to train its model and promised to pay them for it, but months later that has not changed, according to a new report.
Bloomberg detailed that the company promised employees $420 for the documents so it could improve Grok's ability to help users with their own tax returns before April 15, the deadline to submit them.
The outlet went on to detail that people were largely resorting to other tools, including Claude and ChatGPT, and xAI was scrambling to catch up. The company then expanded the request to include the tax returns of employees' friends and family, all of whom were also promised pay.
However, months later, the payments have not materialized. Some who have asked about it were told that the person responsible for the program no longer works there.
Elsewhere, the report also detailed that employees were promised a 20% bonus if they recorded their screens and provided it to Grok. The payments were eventually processed but also took time, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Musk has also faced an AI-related setback this week after a federal court dismissed the lawsuit he filed against OpenAI and its leadership, saying he took too long to do so.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, investing $38 million through its first years. However, he later exited the company and accused its CEO, Sam Altman, and his top deputy of shifting to a for-profit mode behind his back. Altman and OpenAI said there was never a promise to keep the company as a nonprofit forever and Musk knew it.
"We were kind of left for dead," Altman testified, according to CNBC's account of the trial involving the two tech billionaires.
Musk, in turn, was seeking the payment of damages to OpenAI's charitable arm and the ouster of Altman from the company's board.
The jury in the case, however, concluded after just two hours of deliberation that Musk waited too long to file the suit. Even though it served in an advisory role, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the verdict.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with a mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, it created a for-profit subsidiary to raise the massive capital needed for advanced AI research, while maintaining that the nonprofit remained in control. OpenAI says its updated structure keeps the OpenAI Foundation in charge of the for-profit public benefit corporation.
Altman testified that Musk's exit in 2018 came after other founders rejected his demands for sweeping control. Altman reportedly said Musk wanted unilateral authority and disagreed with others over how equity in a future for-profit entity should be split. "I was extremely uncomfortable with it," Altman said.
Altman also reportedly testified Musk wanted to be CEO and insisted on "total control" if OpenAI created a for-profit structure. Altman said one "hair-raising" moment came when Musk allegedly suggested that control could pass to his children if he died.
