Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is looking to hire financial market professionals to make its Grok chatbot more efficient in financial strategy, joining rivals in the AI sector in betting on software aimed at investment professionals.
xAI is actively recruiting Wall Street bankers, portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts for its data annotation teams that train Grok, according to a series of job openings posted on its website. These experts will teach the AI system to reason about financial modeling, including syndication of leveraged loans, investments in stressed assets, and niche securities such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt.
The company is also hiring specialists in the cryptocurrency and stock markets, job advertisements show.
Leading AI developers have increasingly focused on convincing more business professionals to pay for their software, with several startups specifically targeting the financial sector. OpenAI and Anthropic have released tools aimed at streamlining market analysis, investment memos and other tasks. These moves have spooked investors in traditional software providers, which some fear could become obsolete.
xAI, which merged with Musk’s SpaceX last month, is generally seen as lagging behind competitors in winning corporate customers. So far, much of xAI’s revenue has come from deals with Musk’s other ventures, including Tesla Inc. and SpaceX.
Musk’s AI company is rebuilding its business strategy after a turbulent start to the year, which saw it lose many employees, including much of its founding team, and face global backlash after Grok generated explicit images without consent.
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Last week, Musk hired two senior employees from Cursor, a leading AI programming startup that is in fundraising talks at a valuation of $50 billion. Musk admitted at a recent conference that xAI is behind in programming, a feature that has been an important source of revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic.
Musk has also recently highlighted Grok’s ability to “help with your taxes,” after xAI recruited accountants to help train the chatbot.
xAI has been relying on so-called AI tutors, as the employees who train Grok are known, to feed the chatbot with data and adjust its responses. Diego Pasini, recently graduated from high school and at the company for just over a year, leads the tutors, according to a team meeting held last month.
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“One of the bottlenecks is training data,” Pasini said at the time. Grok relies heavily on data from Musk’s social network X.
xAI is focusing much of its AI tutor hiring on credit markets, which are under pressure as private credit funds face redemptions and other challenges.
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