Ex-Nvidia engineer exits Elon Musk’s xAI nine months after building Grok Imagine

An engineer who played a key role in developing xAI’s video generation tool Grok Imagine has left the company just nine months after joining, according to a post shared on X and a report by Moneycontrol.

Zeeshan Patel, a former Nvidia engineer, informed that he joined Elon Musk-founded xAI last year as the first hire for a newly formed video generation team. He stated that his time at the company was short but intense, marked by long workdays and sustained pressure to deliver results at speed.

Patel said the mandate at the time of his joining was ambitious, with the team tasked with building a competitive video generation model from scratch within roughly three months. He informed that a small, tightly knit group worked closely, often late into the night, to meet the deadline, describing the early phase as exhausting but highly focused.

After several months of development, the team released an initial version of the model, Grok Imagine v0.9, Patel stated. He added that this early release later evolved into Grok Imagine 1.0, which is now being used to generate millions of videos daily across X and the Grok app, making it one of the most widely used features on the platforms.

In his post, Patel spoke about the support he received from colleagues during late nights and demanding timelines and informed that Elon Musk personally reviewed the team’s work and offered guidance, including during early morning meetings.

Patel did not state the reasons for his departure but said he was proud of what the team had built in a short span of time. He informed that he has begun a new professional chapter that feels familiar yet different and indicated that further details would be shared at a later stage.