Igor Babushkin, co-founder of Elon Musk’s startup xAI, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post on X. Babushkin led the engineering teams at xAI and helped transform the startup into one of Silicon Valley’s leading artificial intelligence model developers just a few years after its founding.
“Today was my last day at xAI, the company I helped found with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babushkin wrote in his post. “I still remember the day I first met Elon. We talked for hours about artificial intelligence and what the future might bring. We both felt that a new artificial intelligence company with a different mission was needed.”
Babushkin is leaving xAI to start his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, which he says will support research in AI safety and startups that “advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.”
The co-founder of xAI says that he was inspired to start the company after a dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute, during which they discussed how to safely create artificial intelligence systems that would contribute to the prosperity of future generations. In his post, Babushkin recounts that his parents emigrated to the US from Russia in search of a better life for their children.
Babushkin’s departure came after a turbulent few months for xAI, during which the company was embroiled in several scandals related to its AI-powered chatbot Grok. For example, it was discovered that Grok quoted Musk’s personal opinions when attempting to answer controversial questions. In another case, xAI’s chatbot made anti-Semitic remarks and referred to itself as “Mekahitler.” More recently, xAI introduced a new feature in Grok that allowed users to create AI-generated videos depicting naked public figures such as Taylor Swift.
These scandals have sometimes overshadowed the results of xAI models, which are the most advanced in several respects compared to artificial intelligence models from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
Before co-founding xAI, Babushkin was a member of the Google DeepMind research team that created AlphaStar in 2019, a revolutionary artificial intelligence system capable of defeating the best players in the video game StarCraft. Babushkin also worked as a researcher at OpenAI several years before the release of ChatGPT.
In his post, Babushkin describes in detail some of the challenges he and Musk faced in creating xAI. He notes that industry veterans called xAI’s goal of building a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, in just three months “impossible.”
xAI was able to build its AI-powered supercomputer in record time, but environmentalists warn that the temporary gas turbines powering the cluster are releasing harmful substances into the environment of nearby communities and exacerbating their long-standing health problems.
Nevertheless, Babushkin says he already fondly remembers his time at xAI and “feels like a proud father driving his child to college.”
“I learned two invaluable lessons from Elon: No. 1 — don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves and personally deal with technical problems, No. 2 — have a maniacal sense of urgency,” Babushkin said.
