Founder of xAI, Igor Babuschkin, Steps Down to Launch AI-focused Venture Capital Firm
Phoenix Tech News August 14th, the co-founder of the artificial intelligence startup xAI, Igor Babuschkin, announced his departure from the company on X's platform. As the leader of the engineering team at xAI, Babuschkin has been instrumental in helping this company grow into one of the leading AI model development companies in Silicon Valley since its founding in 2023.
“Today is my last day at xAI, this company was founded by me and Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote on X's platform. “I still remember the first time I met Musk, we spent hours talking about artificial intelligence and future directions. We both believed that there needed to be a new AI company with different missions, and developing human-advancing AI has been my lifelong dream.”
Regarding Babuschkin's departure, Musk replied on X's platform: “Thank you for helping build @xAI! We wouldn't have today without you.”
According to Babuschkin, he will be launching a venture capital firm focused on supporting AI safety research and investing in early-stage startups related to human-advancing AI systems. As a technical expert with experience at Google, DeepMind, and OpenAI, Babuschkin highlighted his key contributions at xAI: building the engineering team, leading the team's rapid growth, and delivering cutting-edge models.
It is worth noting that Babuschkin has been preparing to launch a venture capital firm with Musk since their initial discussions. He believes that AI will soon surpass human reasoning levels and is concerned about ensuring these technologies are used for good. He also shared his vision of using AI to benefit humanity.
As the co-founder of xAI, Babuschkin's track record at the company includes:
July 12th, 2023, he joined Musk's new startup xAI as a core member. At the team's first public activity that year, he participated in explaining technology goals and emphasized that xAI would combine Tesla's physical world data with model training.
March 2024, Babuschkin gave a speech at an NVIDIA technology conference, pointing out the value of integrating the Grok chatbot into social media platforms X and reaffirming xAI's main goal of developing fundamental models that understand physical laws.
As of February 2025, as the team lead, he participated in the release event for the third-generation Grok model and demonstrated it alongside Musk on stage at a media Q&A session.