Musk's xAI Pulls a Starlink Engineer to Run Grok's Training Team as Grok V9 Nears Release

Bloomberg·medium signal

Bloomberg reported June 9 that xAI tapped Starlink engineer Jack Garabedian (at SpaceX since 2021) to take over the human-data team training Grok — another instance of Musk shuffling talent across his companies as xAI scales. The move lands as Grok V9-Medium (~1.5T parameters, 3x the current production model) finishes supervised fine-tuning and RL ahead of a mid-June public release, with Musk also touting added 'worktrees' support and the recent rollout of Grok Voice and Grok Imagine 1.5. For builders, the human-data leadership change underscores how much frontier-model quality now hinges on data-curation operations, not just compute.