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Title: Co-Founder of xAI Departs the Company

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/08/14/0414234/c...

Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI, has left the company to start Babuschkin
Ventures, a VC firm focused on AI safety and humanity-advancing startups.
TechCrunch reports: Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build
the startup into one of Silicon Valley's leading AI model developers just a
few years after it was founded. "Today was my last day at xAI, the company
that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023," Babuschkin wrote in the post. "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." Babuschkin is leaving xAI to launch
his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, which he says will support
AI safety research and back startups that "advance humanity and unlock the
mysteries of our universe." The xAI co-founder says he was inspired to start
the firm after a dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life
Institute, in which they discussed how AI systems could be built safely to
encourage the flourishing of future generations. In his post, Babuschkin says
his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in pursuit of a better life
for their children. Prior to co-founding xAI, Babuschkin was part of a
research team at Google DeepMind that pioneered AlphaStar in 2019, a
breakthrough AI system that could defeat top-ranked players at the video game
StarCraft. Babuschkin also worked as a researcher at OpenAI in the years
before it released ChatGPT. In his post, Babuschkin details some of the
challenges he and Musk faced in building up xAI. He notes that industry
veterans called xAI's goal of building its Memphis, Tennessee supercomputer
in just three months "impossible." [...] Nevertheless, Babuschkin says he's
already looking back fondly on his time at xAI, and "feels like a proud
parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college." "I learned 2
priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to
personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency,"
said Babuschkin.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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