Co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI departs the company

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post on X. Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into one of Silicon Valley’s leading AI model developers just a few years after it was founded.

“Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote in the post. “I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.”

Babuschkin is leaving xAI to launch his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, which he says will support AI safety research and back startups that “advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.”

The xAI co-founder says he was inspired to start the firm after a dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, in which they discussed how AI systems could be built safely to encourage the flourishing of future generations. In his post, Babuschkin says his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in pursuit of a better life for their children.

Babuschkin’s departure comes after a tumultuous few months for xAI, in which the company became engrossed in several scandals related to its AI chatbot Grok. For instance, Grok was found to cite Musk’s personal opinions when trying to answer controversial questions. In another case, xAI’s chatbot went on antisemitic rants and called itself “Mechahitler.” Most recently, xAI unveiled a new feature in Grok that allowed users to make AI-generated videos resembling nude public figures, such as Taylor Swift.

These scandals have at times overshadowed the performance of xAI’s models, which are state-of-the-art on several benchmarks compared to AI models from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.

Prior to co-founding xAI, Babuschkin was part of a research team at Google DeepMind that pioneered AlphaStar in 2019, a breakthrough AI system that could defeat top-ranked players at the video game StarCraft. Babuschkin also worked as a researcher at OpenAI in the years before it released ChatGPT.

In his post, Babuschkin details some of the challenges he and Musk faced in building up xAI. He notes that industry veterans called xAI’s goal of building its Memphis, Tennessee supercomputer in just three months “impossible.”

xAI was able to build its AI supercomputer in record time, however, environmentalists warn that the temporary gas turbines powering the cluster are pumping out emissions into neighboring communities and exacerbating their longstanding health issues.

Nevertheless, Babuschkin says he’s already looking back fondly on his time at xAI, and “feels like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college.”

“I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency,” said Babuschkin.

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