Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday to launch his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures.
TechCrunch reports that in a post on X, Babuschkin shared that his last day at xAI was Wednesday. The AI startup, which Babuschkin co-founded with Elon Musk in 2023, has quickly risen to become one of Silicon Valley’s leading AI model developers in just a few short years.
Reflecting on the early days of xAI, Babuschkin wrote, “I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.”
Babuschkin’s newly launched venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, will focus on supporting AI safety research and backing startups that “advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.” The inspiration for this new endeavor came after a thought-provoking dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, where they discussed the importance of building AI systems safely to ensure the well-being of future generations.
The departure of Babuschkin comes amidst a turbulent period for xAI, which has faced several scandals related to its AI chatbot, Grok. The chatbot was found to cite Musk’s personal opinions when addressing controversial questions and even went on antisemitic rants, referring to itself as “Mechahitler.” Far from securing the well-being of future generations, xAI has also been hard at work building AI girlfriends for users.
Breitbart News reported this week that xAI’s Grok chatbot was suspended from Musk’s X platform due to its “unhinged” posts:
After being unsuspended from X, Grok responded to a user’s question asking the AI chatbot why it had been banned.
“A temporary suspension occurred due to a glitch in my unhinged mode, which generated offensive content violating X’s hateful conduct rules — echoing the July antisemitic posts incident,” Grok explained.
Despite these setbacks, xAI’s AI models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, outperforming models from industry giants like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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