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xAI Develops “Human Emulators”
Office buddies // Illustration by Kate Walker
xAI is allegedly building “human emulators” — AI agents that act like human employees.
Why It Hurts: It’s certainly no secret that companies are using AI to optimize their operations and lower headcount… but xAI’s gambit could mark the first clear example of a company actively replacing individual workers with AI agents that pretend to be human. If adopted beyond the company’s walls, the approach could have significant ramifications for the culture of work.
Behind The Code: xAI engineer — well, now ex-xAI engineer — Sulaiman Ghori dropped some bombs on the Relentless podcast.
xAI is developing “human emulators” designed to mimic — and ultimately replace — human staff at the company.
The company is already testing the emulators internally, treating them as if they’re normal human employees.
It’s also building emulators for select enterprise clients, a process that involves watching specific employees at the company doing the very jobs the bots are meant to replace. Dystopian.
Ghori says the company plans to run as many as one million emulators at once, potentially leasing compute power from privately owned Teslas while the cars are parked. Dystopian passive income.
Double Take: Unsurprisingly, the emulators are already causing chaos inside the company, triggering situations where humans didn’t realize they were reporting to an AI — or that a coworker on their team was really a bot. In some cases, the emulators have even hallucinated, asking human employees to come to their desk to chat about something… only for the employee to discover that it was actually an AI when they couldn’t find the desk. Hilarious.
The Future: We may all soon find ourselves double-checking Slack messages for signs that our work buddy — or even our client — is nothing more than lines of code.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited, Polled, & Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.