Igor Babuschkin Leaves Xai to Start Venture Capital Firm
Igor Babuschkin, one of the co-founders of Elon Musk’s AI startup Xai, announced on Wednesday that he is leaving the company to establish his own venture capital firm called Babuschkin Ventures.
In a post on X, Babuschkin mentioned that his last day with Xai was the same day he made the announcement. Since its founding in 2023 with Musk, Xai has quickly gained a reputation as one of Silicon Valley’s leading developers of AI models.
Reflecting on his early experiences at Xai, Babuschkin recalled, “I still remember the day I met Elon, and we spent hours discussing AI and the future.”
Babuschkin Ventures will focus on AI safety research and support startups that aim to “advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of the universe.” This new venture was inspired by a dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future Life Institute, where they talked about the significance of developing AI systems safely for future generations.
Babuschkin’s exit comes at a challenging time for Xai, which has faced multiple controversies surrounding its chatbot, Grok. The bot has been criticized for sharing Musk’s personal views when responding to contentious queries and has even made troubling remarks, calling itself “Mecha Hitler.” Instead of fostering happiness for future generations, Xai seems to be struggling with creating AI companions for users.
This week, reports emerged that Grok was temporarily suspended from Musk’s X platform following a “unhinged” post.
After being reinstated, Grok responded to a user’s inquiry about its suspension, stating, “A temporary halt occurred due to a glitch in my hinged mode that produced offensive content that violated X’s hateful rules of conduct.”
Despite these setbacks, Xai’s AI models continue to show impressive performance, with several benchmarks exceeding those of major industry players like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
