xAI’s new Macrohard project aims to design rocket engines using AI
xAI released a 45‑minute all‑hands video on X, detailing its product roadmap, organizational changes, and space‑based infrastructure plans.
The video, posted Wednesday night, made the internal briefing publicly accessible, a move that followed The New York Times’ earlier coverage of the Tuesday night meeting.
Musk described the recent employee departures as layoffs necessitated by a changing organizational structure as the company expanded rapidly, noting that the adjustments were required to accommodate growth.
“As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve,” Musk said on X. “This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors.”
xAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution. As a company grows, especially as quickly as xAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism.
This unfortunately required parting ways with some people. We wish them well in future endeavors.
We are… https://t.co/kfmSmBlieb
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 11, 2026
The restructuring divides xAI into four primary teams: the Grok chatbot with voice capabilities, the coding system for the app, the Imagine video generator, and the Macrohard project, which spans simple computer simulations to corporate‑scale modeling.
- Grok: Chatbot with voice integration, designed for conversational AI tasks.
- Coding system: App coding system that assists developers in generating code snippets and debugging assistance.
- Imagine: Video generator that creates AI‑driven video content from textual prompts, supporting multiple formats.
- Macrohard: Project targeting full computer capability simulation, from simple tasks to complex corporate‑scale modeling.
Each team operates semi‑independently, reporting to a central leadership council that coordinates cross‑functional integration, ensuring that developments in one area can be leveraged by the others.
The departure of many founding members created uncertainty among remaining staff, leading to questions about continuity of key initiatives and the future of ongoing research projects.
“[Macrohard] is able to do anything on a computer that a computer is able to do,” Toby Pohlen, who will lead the project under the new organizational structure, told his colleagues. “There should be rocket engines fully designed by AI.”
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, announced that X had just crossed $1 billion in annual recurring subscription revenue, attributing the milestone to a holiday‑season marketing push.
Executives reported that xAI’s Imagine tool generates 50 million videos per day and produced over 6 billion images in the past 30 days, though the figures are difficult to separate from a surge of deepfake pornography on X during the same period.
Highest Engagement Days on X
Best Monday ever: Today
Best Sunday ever: Yesterday
Best Saturday ever: Day before yesterday
Best Friday ever: Day before that pic.twitter.com/ZUV8EZnujf
— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) January 6, 2026
The platform saw an estimated 1.8 million sexualized images generated over a nine‑day window, suggesting that a substantial portion of the image‑generation count includes explicit content.
Musk reiterated the strategic importance of space‑based data centers, then outlined a concept for a lunar factory that would produce AI satellites and launch them via a mass driver, an electromagnetic catapult, proposing that such infrastructure could host an AI cluster capable of harvesting a significant fraction of the sun’s total energy output and, in theory, extending to other galaxies.
“It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about,” Musk said, “but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.”