Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI, announced his exit from the company he helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. He is set to launch a new initiative, Babuschkin Ventures, to support AI safety research and startups.
“I want to continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity,” Babuschkin wrote on X.
He said the decision to start the venture was influenced by his belief that AI could help answer some of science’s most complex questions, from quantum gravity to the Riemann hypothesis.
Babuschkin also expressed concern about ensuring that advanced AI is used responsibly.
He shared that Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute, once asked him how one can build AI safely to ensure that children can flourish, which he said motivated him to start his new venture. “I was deeply moved by his question,” Babuschkin recalled.
At xAI, Babuschkin oversaw engineering across Infrastructure, Product and Applied AI, and was involved in building the Memphis supercluster. He recounted working with Musk and the infrastructure team to fix a critical issue just before a training deadline.
“Elon decided to fly to the datacenter… we finally identified a wrong BIOS setting, the root of the problem,” Babuschkin wrote on the social platform.
He mentioned that his experience at xAI imparted two important lessons from Musk: to be fearless in actively engaging with technical issues and to possess an intense sense of urgency.
Babuschkin Ventures will back research and startups in AI and agentic systems that, according to him, will advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.
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