Reid Hoffman: SpaceX is 'not an AI company,' xAI is a 'train wreck'—and room for OpenAI, Anthropic - Fortune

Ah, Reid Hoffman — LinkedIn co-founder, OpenAI board member, and now the AI industry's most entertaining trash-talker. In a recent interview, Hoffman declared Elon Musk's xAI a 'complete train wreck,' noting that all 11 of its original co-founders have departed. Because nothing says 'healthy ecosystem' like billionaires publicly slagging off each other's AI labs while their own organisations remain opaque about safety practices. He also dismissed SpaceX's AI ambitions as 'buying your way into relevance' — a critique that lands somewhere between pot and kettle given how much of Silicon Valley's AI progress has been purchased rather than invented.

The timing is impeccable. xAI, which raised billions on the promise of a 'truth-seeking' AI, now has an executive roster that resembles a revolving door at a particularly chaotic startup. Eleven co-founders gone — that's not a brain drain, that's a full-scale evacuation. Meanwhile, Hoffman's own LinkedIn has been quietly folding AI features into its platform, because where else would you want your career advice generated by a machine trained on every corporate buzzword from the last decade? The schadenfreude is delicious, but one wonders if anyone in this fight has clean hands.

Of course, Hoffman reserved his most pointed praise for OpenAI and Anthropic, the labs he's associated with. Because nothing says impartiality like entangling yourself with the very companies you're defending. The AI industry is now a spectator sport for oligarchs who can't agree on which of their creations will automate the most jobs. Cheers, lads — may the best-compromised model win.