Der Mitbegründer von xAI, ein Renommierter, hat kündigt und geht, um den nächsten Musk zu finden.

Another prominent employee is leaving xAI.

Igor Babuschkin has already switched back and forth between DeepMind and OpenAI and joined xAI as a co - founder in 2023. Here, he played a crucial role, led the team in iterating Grok from the first to the fourth generation, and also oversaw the construction of xAI's supercomputer cluster in Memphis.

On August 13th (local time), he suddenly posted a long message on X, in which he recalled the past and discussed the future. In short: xAI is great, but I want to go independent.

His path after "going independent" is very special.

Igor revealed that he will found the venture capital firm Babuschkin Ventures, which is specifically committed to AI safety research and invests in startups that "advance human progress and uncover the secrets of the universe."

The comings and goings of top artificial intelligence experts are nothing new. But for someone like Igor to switch directly from research to the venture capital industry is very rare.

Other colleagues usually either go to other companies, like the other two prominent figures from xAI's founding team, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy; or they found their own AI companies, like co - founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, and former chief technology officer Mira Murati.

Even top experts who switch from AI research to the venture capital industry are usually older than Igor.

Although Igor has an impressive resume and numerous personal achievements, publicly available information suggests that he is only around 35 years old.

Perhaps the answer lies in his "farewell speech" on X - Elon Musk taught him to "always feel an almost crazy sense of urgency." As a top expert in the field of AI, Igor knows that the impending AGI is the most urgent matter.

And instead of just being part of history, he'd rather make history. Working in a single AI company is no longer enough to fulfill this desire. The venture capital industry is the right direction.

01

"xAI wouldn't have come this far without you."

Igor's "farewell speech" is very long. Translated into German, it would be almost 1500 words. It is simple and sincere and has a bit of a tearful goodbye feel to it.

Elon Musk is surely also very touched and wrote in the comment: "Thank you for helping to build xAI! We wouldn't have come this far without you."

This is actually true. Igor was really a key person for xAI.

In 2023, xAI was founded, and the founding team consisted of 12 people. In the list published on the website, Igor's name is right behind Elon Musk's. This is both an acknowledgment of Igor and of Musk's AI startup.

Before founding xAI, Igor already had rich industry experience and academic achievements.

As a child, Igor admired scientists like Richard Feynman, who were constantly pushing the boundaries of physics to understand the secrets of the universe. Naturally, he then studied physics at the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany and later became a doctoral candidate in particle physics at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).

During this phase, Igor noticed that it was becoming increasingly difficult to make new physical discoveries. The required accelerators were getting bigger and bigger, and new discoveries were becoming rarer. So he began to think that the key to understanding the universe might not lie in bigger accelerators but in superintelligence.

The career - transforming step is clearly visible on Igor's LinkedIn profile. After CERN, he switched to DeepMind.

In 2017, Google had acquired DeepMind three years earlier. DeepMind had already paid off for Google. AlphaGo, based on a deep neural network and Monte - Carlo tree search (MCTS), had defeated the world champion of Go, Lee Sedol.

After Igor joined, he led the AlphaStar project. Then DeepMind surprised the world again - AlphaStar achieved the "Grandmaster" status on a real StarCraft game server through mechanisms such as imitation learning, self - play, and multi - agent systems.

First, an AI defeated the world champion of Go, then an AI defeated humans in a game. DeepMind and Google have thus solidified their position in the field of artificial intelligence.

In addition, Igor also participated in the WaveNet project, a high - quality speech synthesis technology based on deep neural networks, which is widely used in speech generation.

After almost four years at DeepMind, Igor began a phase of "switching back and forth."

From November 2020 to February 2023, Igor switched from DeepMind to OpenAI and returned to DeepMind in April 2022.

Naturally, Igor left achievements in each of these career phases.

At OpenAI, Igor participated in the Codex project, a language model based on GPT, which was fine - tuned on public GitHub codes and specifically developed for generating Python code. Codex was the foundation for the product development of GitHub Copilot. In addition, Igor also participated in the development of GPT - 4.

When he returned to Google DeepMind, Igor participated in the AlphaCode project and took charge of prototype development and infrastructure building.

At the beginning of 2023, OpenAI's ChatGPT had already been released and triggered a new global AI wave, stronger than all previous ones.

Instead of returning to OpenAI again, Igor accepted Elon Musk's offer and joined the new startup xAI.

At the beginning, there was nothing. Igor built many basic tools for the company to start and manage training tasks. Later, he took charge of most of the company's engineering work, including infrastructure, products, and applied AI projects. Since the first generation of Grok, Igor has been in charge, and he also oversaw the construction of the supercomputer cluster Colossus in Memphis.

xAI started late but has become the fastest - growing startup in this field.

The Colossus cluster was built in 122 days and consists of 100,000 NVIDIA H100 chips, setting a new industry record. It provides xAI with enormous computing power. Grok has already reached the fourth generation in 28 months and is now a direct competitor to OpenAI GPT and Google Gemini. xAI's market value has already increased to over $50 billion one and a half years after its founding. After the merger with X and a new financing round, the enterprise value of xAI could rise to $200 billion.

02

The Iron Man from Silicon Valley and the Melancholic Russian

When Igor recalls the time of his recruitment at xAI, he mentions that he had a several - hour conversation with Elon Musk at that time, and both thought "it was necessary to found a new AI company with a different mission."

This formulation is very subtle. What does "different mission" mean? And why is it necessary?

Musk's position is no secret. He (claims) to believe that AGI should not fall into the hands of technology giants like Google. So he participated in the founding of OpenAI. Later, he found that OpenAI had deviated from its original mission and left the company. Before founding xAI in 2023, Musk publicly attacked OpenAI several times as "dishonest" and accused it of submitting to Microsoft and becoming a "puppet company."

From this perspective, it is very likely that the "new AI company with a different mission" is supposed to be different from technology giants like Google and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI that are dependent on giants.

"Elon has been warning about the potential risks of strong artificial intelligence for years. Igor and I have found that we have the same vision of how AI can be used for the benefit of humanity."

Many people doubt Musk's claim that he cares about all of humanity. But we can assume that like many other top experts in the field of AI, Igor is really excited and at the same time fearful of AGI and is really driven by a "mission."

Igor was presumably born in the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was on its last legs. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his parents emigrated to the United States.

In Russian, there is the word "Toska," a complex emotional concept. As literary giant Vladimir Nabokov said, it is difficult to describe this word with a single term in English. If one has to describe it, Toska is an indescribable melancholy, a deep longing, or a spiritual torment. It goes beyond simple sadness and combines longing, emptiness, and existential anxiety.

Interestingly, this "Toska - melancholy" also appears in Russian emigrants and their descendants. Among top Russian experts in the field of artificial intelligence, this "Toska - melancholy" has turned into a deep concern about the control, safety, and future well - being of humanity through AGI.

Another well - known Russian researcher is Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI. He enjoys a high reputation in the industry and was one of the developers of the revolutionary Convolutional Neural Network (AlexNet), as well as one of the founders of the Transformer model and GPT.

At the same time, he is like his former teacher, the "Father..." (The original text seems incomplete here)