Igor Babuschkin, co -founder of the Startup XAI of Elon Musk, announced his company’s departure on Wednesday in a Publish in x. Babuschkin led the engineering teams in XAI and helped build the startup in one of the main models of AI de Silicon Valley only a few years after its foundation.
“Today was my last day in XAI, the company that helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote in the publication. “I still remember the day that first with Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future could have. We both felt that a new AI company was needed with a different mission child.”
Babuschkin will leave Xai to launch its own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, who says he will support AI security research and new companies that “advance to humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.”
The XAI co -founder says that he was inspired to begin the company after a dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, in which they discussed how the AI systems could be constructed safely to encourage the flowering of future generations. In his position, Babuschkin says that his parents emigrated to the United States from Russia in search of a better life for their children.
Babuschkin’s departure occurs after a few tumultuous months for XAI, in which the company was absorbed in several scandals related to its AI Chatbot Grok. For example, it was found that Grok was He quotes Musk’s personal opinions When trying to answer controversial questions. In another case, Xai’s chatbot continued anti -Semitic diatribes And he called himself “Mechitler.” More recent, XAI announced a new characteristic in Grok that allowed users to make videos generated by AI Similar to naked public figuresLike Taylor Swift.
These scandals have sometimes eclipsed the performance of XAI models, which are The latest In several reference points compared to OpenAi, Google Deepmind and Anthrope’s models.
Before Cofundar XAI, Babuschkin was part of a Google Deepmind research team that was a pioneer in Alphastar in 2019, an innovative AI system that could defeat the best classified players in the Starcraft video game. Babuschkin also worked as an OpenI researcher in the years prior to the Chatgpt publication.
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In its publication, Babuschkin details some of the challenges that he and Musk faced in the construction of Xai. He points out that industry veterans called Xai’s goal to build their Memphis supercomputer, Tennessee in just three months “impossible.”
Xai was able to build his AI supercomputer in record time, however, Environmentalists warn That temporary gas turbines that drive the cluster are pumping emissions to neighboring communities and exacerbating their long -standing health problems.
However, Neverberthing, Babuschkin says he is already looking at his time in Xai, and “feels like a proud father, moving away after sending his son to the university.”
“I learned 2 invaluable lessons from Elon: #1 Be intrepid by rolling the sleeves to personally deepen technical problems, #2 have an emergency manic sense,” Babuschkin said.
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