Key highlights:
- xAI’s secret Macrohard project uses AI “human emulators” to perform tasks faster than human employees.
- Tesla cars could provide computing power to scale the secret AI workforce across millions of emulators.
- The project represents a new, fully AI-driven approach to digital workflow automation.
xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori announced his departure from the company on January 19, just days after revealing details of xAI’s secret human emulation project, Macrohard, on the Relentless podcast.
I have left xAI
Nothing but love to my former team and coworkers!
— Sulaiman Khan Ghori (@sulaimanghori) January 19, 2026
Macrohard is an ambitious initiative to create a fully AI-driven software company, with a name playfully referencing Microsoft.
Secret human emulation transforms digital work
At the core of Macrohard is a “human emulator”, an AI system that can simulate human employees on a computer. The system interacts with keyboards and mice, reads screens, and completes digital tasks without modifying software.
Within xAI, these AI-powered “employees” are already deployed in real workflows, sometimes without colleagues realizing it, leading to situations where teams search for humans at empty desks.
These secret emulators can handle tasks they weren’t specifically trained for and perform 1.5 to 8 times faster than humans. Models are updated multiple times daily using AI agents based on Grok, optimized for programming, content creation, and product testing.
Scaling AI through Tesla cars
To expand Macrohard, xAI plans to use idle Tesla vehicles across North America as distributed computing nodes. Cars sit idle 50-80% of the time, yet remain connected, cooled, and powered, making them ideal for running AI human emulators at scale.
This approach could allow scaling from 1,000 to over a million AI employees, efficiently and cost-effectively.
Elon Musk first announced Macrohard in August 2025 as a “pure AI software company,” arguing that software companies that don’t produce hardware could be entirely replicated using AI.
In October, Musk described the project as potentially “profoundly influential on a massive scale,” even painting the Macrohard name on the roof of the Colossus 2 data center in Memphis. xAI continues to hire technical specialists and tutors for Macrohard positions.
The reasons for Ghori’s departure remain undisclosed, though sharing internal details of the secret human emulation project may have caused friction with management. Despite this, Macrohard demonstrates xAI’s vision of fully AI-driven digital workflows, showing a future where AI can operate independently and at speeds far beyond human capability.
Source:: xAI Engineer Leaves After Sharing Secret Macrohard Human Emulation Project