Elon Musk, the owner of X and the artificial intelligence company xAI, is busy threatening Apple with legal action, claiming that the Cupertino HQ-ed company has made it “impossible” for apps to compete with apps from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The claim has been refuted. There’s another problem for Musk: Igor Babuschkin, the co-founder of xAI, has quit.
Babuschkin helmed the engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into an important AI startup. “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,” he said in a post on X/Twitter.
Babuschkin is set to begin his 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”.
A former research engineer for Google’s DeepMind and a former member of OpenAI’s technical staff, Babuschkin has been a respected name in the AI arena. “Through blood sweat and tears, our team’s blistering velocity built the Memphis supercluster, and shipped frontier models faster than any company in history,” he wrote. The facility in Memphis processes data and trains the models that power xAI’s Grok chatbot.
xAI’s Grok chatbot has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. In May, the chatbot automatically generated posts about alleged “white genocide” in South Africa. The company had to apologise. In July, there was another problem — after a code update, the chatbot automatically generated antisemitic content across X.
“I learned two 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,” wrote Babuschkin.
Meanwhile, about Musk’s allegations against Apple’s App Store, the Tim Cook-led company said in a statement to BBC: “We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria.”