Elon Musk’s xAI is losing one of its founding members. Igor Babushkin, a co-founder of the developer behind Grok, announced yesterday (Aug. 13) that he is departing the company to start his own venture capital firm focused on A.I. startups. “Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” said Babuschkin in a post on X. “I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about A.I. and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new A.I. company with a different kind of mission was needed.”
Musk responded to Babushkin by thanking him for his efforts and stating that xAI “wouldn’t be here without you.” The billionaire launched the startup two years ago with a mission to prioritize accuracy, safety and the advancement of human capabilities. xAI’s flagship product is Grok, an A.I. chatbot that competes with other leading models across multiple industry benchmarks.
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Babushkin, who led engineering teams at xAI, joined the company in May 2023 after previous roles at Google DeepMind and OpenAI. Trained as a physicist at CERN in Switzerland and TU Dortmund in Germany, he later developed an interest in advanced A.I. and connected with Musk over what he described as “a shared vision of A.I. used to benefit humanity.”
The company’s early days were challenging, Babushkin admitted. “Naysayers told us we’d arrived too late, that building a top A.I. company from scratch would be impossible,” he wrote in a post on X. He recounted how his team built xAI’s massive Memphis supercluster in just 120 days “through blood, sweat and tears.”
The Memphis training cluster, despite its scale, has drawn local criticism for relying on emission-heavy gas turbines. Grok itself has also faced controversy, with reports of the chatbot making antisemitic remarks and echoing Musk’s personal views in responses.
Over the years, Babushkin said, he learned two key lessons from Musk: to “be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into the technical problems,” and to “have a maniacal sense of urgency.”
His next move is to launch Babushkin Ventures, a firm that will invest in startups and agentic systems “that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe”—a mission that closely mirrors xAI’s stated goal to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
A.I. safety will be a central focus for the firm, Babushkin added. “As frontier models become more agentic over long horizons and a wider range of tasks, they will take on more and more powerful capabilities, which will make it critical to study and advance A.I. safety,” he said. “I want to continue on my mission to bring about A.I. that’s safe and beneficial to humanity.”
Babushkin is one of the few original members to leave xAI since Musk founded it with a 12-person team drawn largely from OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Other departures include researchers Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy, who left last year for roles at OpenAI and Morph Labs, respectively, while most co-founders have remained.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
