Zeehsan Patel, a member of technical staff at Elon Musk’s xAI, has resigned less than a year after joining the company. Patel announced his departure in a detailed post shared on social media platform X, where he reflected on his time at xAI, the work he led, and the people he collaborated with during his tenure.He joined the company in May last year as the first hire for xAI’s video generation team and was closely involved in developing Grok Imagine, the firm’s video generation model. In his post, Patel described the fast-paced work culture at xAI, the tight timelines under which the team operated, and the scale at which Grok Imagine is now being used. 

He also thanked Elon Musk for his guidance and support, along with several colleagues and collaborators, while noting that he has moved on to a new professional chapter.

Here’s what Zeehsan Patel wrote on X

Recently, I left my role @xAI. I joined last year as the first hire for the new video generation team. It’s been a crazy journey to get where we are today with @Grok Imagine.

When I first joined, our goal was to create a SOTA video generation model within ~3 months from scratch. To build the best video generation model possible with a small team and short timeline at xAI required extreme first-principles thinking and ludicrous execution speed. In typical xAI fashion, we started a war room for this effort. After a couple months of burning the 3am oil 🪔, we trained xAI’s first video model: Grok Imagine v0.9. With the latest release of @Grok Imagine 1.0, our model is now the most used video model in the world, generating millions of videos per day. It’s quickly become one of the largest features both on @X and the Grok app. I’m super excited about the future Grok Imagine models, and I’m sure the team will continue to create delightful experiences for all of our users.

I’m very grateful to have found amazing friends and collaborators at xAI. I’d like thank @ibab

for bringing me into xAI and giving me the opportunity of a lifetime to build an amazing product. To @Sergey_xai @johnmullan for their support and giving me a warm welcome to the company. To @ZhibeiM @zeliu for being great mentors and close collaborators. To @chaoqi_w for pairing with me during the early war room days and the fun research discussions. To @EthanHe_42 @jathushan for being amazing friends and supportive late-night collaborators. To 

@endernewton for all the great research insights and advice. To @chaitu for showing me what makes a great product. To @kwotsin @sishaar for all the great chats about research and life. To @hexianghu for all the helpful advice and fun conversations. To @r_ahulravi @araavp @SahilJain314 @evanzwangg @aheze0 @LiTianleli @JackCaiXun for the late night ping pong games and memorable discussions. And to everyone else I didn’t mention by name but who were amazing friends and colleagues ❤️.

Finally, a huge thank you to @elonmusk for his time and guidance. It’s been a long journey from the early days when we had 3am review meetings with Elon till now and his support has been vital to our success. I had an amazing time learning directly from Elon to improve my engineering mindset and intuition.

Super proud of what we shipped as a team. As for me, I have embarked on a new adventure, one that feels familiar yet very different. I hope to share more soon.