🚪xAI Down Two More Co-Founders as Musk Rebuilds
Elon Musk just posted that xAI was not built right and needs a ground-up rebuild. Of the 11 original co-founders, 9 have now departed, leaving only Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen working with Musk.
- —Latest departures: Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang recently left; Zhang led Grok Code and reported directly to Musk
- —Taking the blame: According to FT, Musk had blamed Zhang for Grok coding shortfalls
- —Reorg fallout: Dozens of employees left in a major reorganization prior to this
- —New hires: xAI hired senior Cursor leaders Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg last week
Why it matters: Musk is tearing things down for a major rebuild. With splashy new coding hires and a nearly complete exodus of co-founders, xAI has serious work to do to hit Musk lofty goals — especially while navigating an upcoming IPO.
💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI Use Cases
The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where staff members share how they use AI in their work and daily lives.
- —Billy (University Educator): Uses OpenClaw daily to check Toyota dealership inventory within 250 miles for black or white RAV-4s with heated seats because his wife wants to buy the most popular car in the world
- —Zach (AI Writer): Testing Perplexity Computer for surfacing viral social content across X and Reddit, and for clipping and captioning video content in minutes instead of hours
Why it matters: Real AI use cases are often simple but solve specific pain points. From inventory monitoring to content creation, AI is permeating every aspect of daily work.
🎥Create an Intro Animation for Your Brand in 15 Minutes
Learn how to use Manus to generate branded intro, transition, and outro bumper videos for your brand with no motion designer or video editor required.
- —Step 1: Open a Manus task, upload your logo, and prompt: I want a branded intro bumper, transition, and outro bumper video based on these logos. Ask 3-5 MCQs about style and vibe before starting. Use the video generator skill.
- —Step 2: Answer Manus questions about vibe, animation style, and colors. Ask it to visualize options so you can pick the best one.
- —Step 3: Type /video-generator and tell it to generate the chosen concept — Manus will generate keyframes using Nano Banana and then animate them with Veo 3.
- —Step 4: Use the default mode to save on tokens. Once done, download the finished clips and drop them into your video editor.
Why it matters: Manus will try to find and add royalty-free audio to your clips. We recommend you tell it to skip this. It does not usually find the best audio and ends up eating tokens.
🧬AI-Designed Vaccine Shrinks Rescue Dog Tumor
Sydney AI consultant Paul Conyngham built a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog Rosie, diagnosed with mast cell cancer and given months to live. He chained ChatGPT, Grok, DeepMind AlphaFold, and UNSW genomics lab to turn 350 GB of tumor data into a treatment with real results.
- —Diagnosis: Rosie was diagnosed in 2024 with months to live despite chemo and surgery
- —AI-powered research: Used ChatGPT to map research, paid $3K for genomic sequencing, fed data through AlphaFold to model mutations
- —Vaccine creation: UNSW RNA Institute helped turn the formula into a custom vaccine; Conyngham revealed Grok designed the final construct
- —Real results: One tumor shrank by half after her December injection; working on a second vaccine for non-responding tumors
Why it matters: A year ago, a pet owner with no biology training could not turn a cancer diagnosis into sequenced DNA, modeled proteins, and a working vaccine blueprint. Rosie is not completely cured, but AI provided tools to take a real swing at a previously hopeless situation.