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 start-up in 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 could have. We both felt that a new AI company was needed with another kind of mission.”
Babuschkin leaves XAI to launch his own venture capital company, Babuschkin Ventures, which he says will support AI security research and back startups that “promote humanity and unlock the mysteries of the universe.”
Xai-co-founder says he was inspired to start the company after a dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of The Future of Life Institute, where they discussed how AI systems could be built safely to encourage flowering of future generations. In his post, Babuschkin says his parents immigrated to the United States from Russia in search of a better life for their children.
Babuschkin’s departure comes after a tumultuous couple of months for Xai, where the company was recorded by several scandals related to his AI -Chatbot Grok. For example, it turned out that Grok cited Musk’s personal opinions when trying to answer controversial questions. In another case, Xai’s Chatbot went on anti -Semitic Rants and called himself “Mechahitler.” Most recently, Xai revealed a new feature in Grok that allowed users to make AI-generated videos similar to naked public characters, such as Taylor Swift.
These scandals have at times overshadowed the performance of Xai’s models, which are advanced on several benchmarks compared to AI models from Openai, Google Deepmind and Anthropic.
Before forming Xai, Babuschkin was part of a research team at Google Deepmind, pioneering Alphastar in 2019, a breakthrough AI system that could defeat top-ranked players on video games Starcraft. Babuschkin also worked as a researcher at Openai in the years before releasing Chatgpt.
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In his post, Babuschkin describes some of the challenges he and Musk faced to build Xai. He notes that industry veterans called XAI’s goal of building his Memphis, Tennessee Supercomputer in just three months “impossible.”
Xai was able to build its AI super computer in record time, but environmentalists warn that the temporary gas turbines driving the cluster are pumping out emissions in neighboring communities and aggravating their long -standing health problems.
Nevertheless, Babuschkin says he already looks lovingly back on his time at Xai, and “feels like a proud parent driving away after sending their child away in college.”
“I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 Be fearless by rolling up the sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 has a maniacal feeling of urgent character,” Babuschkin said.
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