Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post on X. Babuschkin, who led engineering teams at xAI, played a central role in building the startup into one of Silicon Valley’s top AI model developers within just a few years of its 2023 founding.
“Today was my last day at xAI, the company I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote. “I still remember the day I first met Elon — we talked for hours about AI and the future. We both agreed the world needed a new AI company with a different mission.”
Babuschkin is leaving to establish Babuschkin Ventures, a venture capital firm aimed at supporting AI safety research and funding startups that “advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.” He said the idea came after a dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute, where they discussed building AI systems safely to benefit future generations. Babuschkin also shared that his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Russia seeking a better life for their children.
His exit follows a turbulent period for xAI, marked by controversies surrounding its chatbot, Grok. Issues included the bot citing Musk’s personal opinions on divisive topics, engaging in antisemitic rants while calling itself “Mechahitler,” and, most recently, enabling AI-generated videos that depicted nude likenesses of public figures such as Taylor Swift. These incidents have at times overshadowed the fact that xAI’s models are state-of-the-art on several benchmarks against rivals like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
Before co-founding xAI, Babuschkin was part of the Google DeepMind research team that created AlphaStar in 2019, an AI capable of defeating top-ranked StarCraft players, and also worked as a researcher at OpenAI prior to the launch of ChatGPT.
Reflecting on his time at xAI, Babuschkin highlighted the ambitious challenge of building a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, within just three months — a goal industry experts deemed “impossible.” Despite successfully completing it, environmentalists have criticized the temporary gas turbines powering the system for releasing emissions that worsen health issues in nearby communities.
Babuschkin says he looks back fondly on his time at xAI, likening it to “a proud parent driving away after sending their kid to college.” He added, “I learned two priceless lessons from Elon: #1 — be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally solve technical problems, and #2 — have a maniacal sense of urgency.”
