Co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI departs the company

Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of the Xai Startup of Elon Musk, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a Post on X. Babuschkin led technical teams at Xai and helped in building the startup in one of the leading AI model developers of Silicon Valley just a few years after it was founded.

“Today was my last day at Xai, the company that I helped with Elon Musk in 2023,” wrote Babuschkin in the post. “I still remember the day I met Elon for the first time, we spoke to AI for hours and what the future could entail. We both thought that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.”

Babuschkin leaves Xai to launch his own risk capital company Babuschkin Ventures, which he says the AI safety study will support and startups that “promote 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, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, in which they discussed how AI systems could be built safely to encourage the flourishing of future generations. In his position, Babuschkin says that his parents emigrated from Russia to the US to pursue a better life for their children.

The departure of Babuschkin comes after a tumultuous few months before Xai, in which the company was seized in various scandals with regard to his AI Chatbot grok. Grok, for example, turned out to mention the personal opinions of Musk when trying to answer controversial questions. In another case, Xai’s chatbot went on anti -Semitic tirades and called himself ‘mechhitler’. Xai recently revealed a new feature in Grok with which users could make AI-generated videos Look like nude public figuresSuch as Taylor Swift.

These scandals have sometimes overshadowed the performance of Xai’s models, which are ultramodern on different benchmarks compared to AI models from OpenAi, Google Deepmind and Anthropic.

Prior to the establishment of Xai, Babuschkin was part of a research team at Google DeepMind that pioneered in Alphastar in 2019, a breakthrough AI system that could beat top players at the VideoGame Starcraft. Babuschkin also worked as a researcher at OpenAi in the years before the chatgpt released.

In his position, Babuschkin describes some challenges with which he and Musk were confronted when building Xai. He notes that veterans in the industry called Xai’s goal to build his Memphis, Tennessee Supercomputer in just three months ‘impossible’.

However, Xai was able to build his AI -Supercomputer in record time, however, Warn environmental activists That the temporary guest turbines that drive the cluster, emissions in adjacent communities and exacerbate their long -term health problems.

Nevertheless, Babuschkin says that he is already looking back lovingly on his time at Xai, and “feels like a proud parent, driving away after they have sent their child to the university.”

“I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 Be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig in technical problems, #2 have a maniacal feeling of urgency,” said Babuschkin.

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