The key mind who helped Musk build his AI company has just quit
One of Elon Musk’s top AI lieutenants is leaving xAI to pursue his own vision of building safer models.
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One of Elon Musk’s top AI lieutenants is leaving xAI to pursue his own vision of building safer models.
Igor Babuschkin, one of the brains behind Elon Musk’s xAI, is leaving the startup to launch his own company. In a post on X on Wednesday, Babuschkin said he’s stepping away from leading xAI’s engineering teams, where he helped turn the company into a heavyweight in the AI industry.
Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. 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.
undefined Igor Babuschkin (@ibab) August 13, 2025
Building…
As his next step, he is starting Babuschkin Ventures, a fund aimed at supporting AI safety research and AI startups to “advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.”
Babuschkin says that he’s leaving on good terms, looking back fondly at his time helping xAI grow.
“I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold,” Babuschkin wrote in the post on X.
“We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed. Building AI that advances humanity has been my lifelong dream,” he said, looking back at the inception of xAI.
Babuschkin previously worked on DeepMind’s AlphaStar StarCraft agent, and in his post, he underscored the urgency of advancing AI safety.
“I got to see how powerful reinforcement learning is when scaled up. As frontier models become more agentic over longer 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 AI safety.”
He warned that as AI models become more capable of performing a wider range of tasks, safety will become critical to ensuring that technology benefits humanity.
xAI is trying to keep up with the competition
Upon launching the company in 2023, Musk stated that its purpose would be “to understand the true nature of the universe.”
The AI startup raised $6 billion from investors in a funding round that valued the company at $40 billion. The twelve notable founding team members, all from the AI and deep machine learning fields, included:
- Igor Babuschkin, mathematician and AI researcher at DeepMind
- Manuel Kroiss, DeepAI distributed machine learning researcher
- Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, a former Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, and Stanford U researcher
- Jimmy Ba, computer scientist and Professor at the University of Toronto
- Christian Szegedy, AI and deep learning Staff Research Scientist at Google
xAI introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot, in February. It aims to compete with Chinese AI firm DeepSeek and Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
xAI claimed that Grok 3 surpasses competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek in several categories, such as general mathematical reasoning, knowledge about STEM and science, and coding. Grok has also been declared the most environmentally friendly AI chatbot, emitting just 0.17 grams of CO₂ per query, according to TRG Datacenters, a data infrastructure provider.
In March 2025, the company purchased the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Musk clinched a deal in 2022 to buy X for $44 billion, ending its run as a public company since its 2013 initial public offering, declaring that "the bird is freed" once the acquisition closed.
Elon’s Grok model has been involved in controversy
The Grok model has been under pressure recently due to many flaws that have surfaced. Reportedly, the AI video generator was capable of generating images of celebrities topless, with Taylor Swift a particular target.
It also gave an X user detailed instructions on how to break into policy researcher Will Stancil’s home and rape him. And the chatbot made positive comments about Hitler when it was asked about social media posts that seemed to celebrate children’s deaths in the recent Texas floods.
A Turkish court ordered a ban on July 9th, after reports that Grok made vulgar comments about President Erdogan and his late mother. It also attacked other prominent Turkish personalities, including the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.