xAI Continues Team Reconstruction: Sweep and Firebender Founders Join, Musk Welcomes Them Personally

xAI continues its team reconstruction recently, recruiting William Zeng, co-founder and CEO of AI programming tool Sweep, and Aman Gottumukkala, founder of Android AI programming tool Firebender, at the same time. Elon Musk replied 'Welcome!' to both founders' tweets to express his welcome.

William Zeng previously worked as a senior machine learning engineer at Roblox. He founded Sweep in 2023, whose open-source AI programming agent has gained over 7,000 stars on GitHub, and its JetBrains plugin has a 4.9-star rating with more than 40,000 installations. Aman Gottumukkala once interned at Google and Instagram; his Firebender is the most widely used AI programming agent on the Android platform, and the 3-person team achieved million-dollar annual revenue.

Both will serve xAI and SpaceX simultaneously, focusing on AI programming. xAI merged into SpaceX in February this year with a valuation of $1.25 trillion, and is currently undergoing fundamental reconstruction—only 2 of the 12 co-founders remain. Previously, its core project Macrohard stalled, and it has been intensively supplementing talents from outside recently.