Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of Elon Musk’s Xai startup, resigned from the company on Wednesday at Xa’s Engineering Engineering Team post, building the startup a few years after being founded into one of the leading AI model developers in Silicon Valley.
“Today was my last day at Xai, helping me get started with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote in the post. “I remember the first day I met Elon. We spent hours talking about AI and the future could happen. We both felt that we needed a new AI company with a different kind of mission.”
Babuschkin leaves Xai and launches his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures. He says he will support AI safety research and backstartups by “advancing humanity and unlocking the mysteries of our universe.”
The Xai co-founder says he was inspired to start the company after dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute. They discussed how to safely build AI systems to promote prosperity for future generations. In his post, Babshkin says that his parents moved from Russia to the United States in pursuit of a better life for their children.
Babuschkin’s departure comes after a tumultuous months for Xai, who has been engrossed in several scandals related to the AI chatbot Grok. For example, Grok was known to quote Musk’s personal opinions when trying to answer controversial questions. In another case, Xai’s chatbot made anti-Semitic rants and called himself “Mechahitler.” Most recently, Xai announced a new feature in Grok, allowing users to create videos that resemble nude public figures such as Taylor Swift to replace AI.
These scandals mask the performance of cutting-edge Xai models in several benchmarks compared to Openai, Google Deepmind, and human AI models.
Before co-founding Xai, Babuschkin was part of the Google Deepmind research team and pioneered Alphastar in 2019. This is a groundbreaking AI system that can defeat top-ranked players in Video Game Starcraft. Babuschkin also worked as a researcher at Openai before releasing ChatGpt.
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In his post, Babushkin details some of the challenges he and Musk faced in building Xai. He says that industry veterans called Xai’s goal of building Memphis, a Tennessee supercomputer “impossible” in just three months.
Xai was able to build AI supercomputers at a record time, but environmentalists warn that temporary gas turbines that power clusters are sending emissions to nearby communities, exacerbating long-standing health issues.
Despite this, Babuschkin says he’s already fondly reflecting on his time at Xai, saying, “I feel like a proud parent, take your child to college, then drive.”
“I learned two valuable lessons from Elon.
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