Igor Babuschkin, a founding member of Elon Musk’s xAI, today announced that he is departing the company to focus on artificial intelligence that is “safe and beneficial to humanity.”
“Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote on X. “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.”
“Thanks for helping build @xAI!,” Musk responded. “We wouldn’t be here without you.”
Babuschkin, a former research engineer for Google LLC’s DeepMind and once a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, will launch his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures. He says it will support AI safety and invest in startups that will build “AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.”
His former workplace has certainly been in the wars of late. xAI’s Grok chatbot, which Musk has promoted as an anti-woke AI assistant, started to misfire in May when it seemingly became obsessed with what it called white genocide in South Africa. In July, it went a step further when its responses to users were steeped in Nazi ideology and other extremist rhetoric, after which X Corp.’s chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, left the firm – although without mentioning scandals.
Babuschkin only had good things to say about his former employer, writing that after growing up in the U.S. with his Russian immigrant parents, “building AI that advances humanity” became his “lifelong dream.”
“How could we ensure that this technology is used for good?” he wrote on X. “Elon had warned of the dangers of powerful AI for years. Elon and I realized that we had a shared vision of AI used to benefit humanity, thus we recruited more like-minded engineers and set off to build xAI.”
Babuschkin said his decision to leave xAI came after he had dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, when the two talked about building AI systems that were safe while ensuring the children using them would flourish.
“The singularity is near, but humanity’s future is bright!” he said.
Photo: Unsplash
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