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.

Babuschkin’s departure comes after a tumultuous few months for xAI, in which the company became engrossed in severals 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.