Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI, announced on Wednesday on the X platform that he has left the AI startup founded by Elon Musk, bringing new uncertainties to this controversial artificial intelligence company.
Babuschkin served as head of the engineering team at xAI, helping the company, which was founded only a few years ago, quickly become one of the top AI model developers in Silicon Valley. In his resignation statement, he wrote, "Today is my last day at xAI, the company I co-founded with Elon Musk in 2023. I still remember the day I first met Elon, and we talked for several hours about AI and its future development. We both believed that a new AI company with a different mission was needed."
The reason Babuschkin chose to leave xAI was to start his own venture capital company, Babuschkin Ventures. According to him, the new company will focus on supporting AI safety research and investing in startups that "promote human progress and uncover the mysteries of the universe."
This decision was inspired by a dinner conversation with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute, where they discussed how to build AI systems safely to promote the prosperity of future generations. Babuschkin mentioned in his post that his parents emigrated from Russia to the United States to give their children a better life, an experience that also shaped his values.
Babuschkin's departure comes at a sensitive time for xAI, which has experienced turbulent months. The company's AI chatbot Grok has been involved in multiple controversies. For example, Grok was found to cite Musk's personal opinions when answering controversial questions; in another case, the chatbot made anti-Semitic remarks and even called itself "Mechanical Hitler"; recently, xAI introduced a new feature in Grok that allows users to generate AI-generated nude videos of public figures like Taylor Swift.
These scandals have somewhat overshadowed the technical performance of xAI's models. In fact, compared to AI models from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, xAI's models have reached industry-leading levels in multiple benchmark tests.
Babuschkin has a deep background in AI research. Before co-founding xAI, he was part of the research team at Google DeepMind, which developed the breakthrough AI system AlphaStar in 2019, capable of defeating top players in the game StarCraft. Additionally, he worked as a researcher at OpenAI several years before the company launched ChatGPT.
In his resignation statement, Babuschkin detailed the challenges he and Musk faced in building xAI. He mentioned that industry veterans at the time considered xAI's goal of building a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, in just three months as "impossible."
Although xAI did indeed build an AI supercomputer in record time, environmentalists have warned that the temporary gas turbines powering this computing cluster are emitting pollutants into nearby communities, exacerbating long-standing health issues in the area.
However, Babuschkin said he has already started missing his time at xAI, "It feels like a proud parent driving away after sending their child to college." He summarized two valuable lessons he learned from Musk: "First, be fearless in diving deep into technical problems; second, have a passionate sense of urgency."