A co-founder of xAI has left the company to find the next Elon Musk.

Another key figure has left xAI.

Igor Babuschkin, who had previously jumped back and forth between DeepMind and OpenAI, joined xAI as one of the co - founders in 2023. Here, he played a crucial role, leading the team through the iterations of Grok from its first to the fourth generation and also taking charge of building xAI's supercomputing cluster in Memphis.

On August 13th local time, he suddenly posted a long message on X, reminiscing about the past and looking forward to the future. In short, it was: xAI is great, but I'm going solo.

And his destination after "going solo" is quite special.

Igor revealed that he will establish a venture capital firm called Babuschkin Ventures, which will specifically support AI safety research and invest in startups that "drive human progress and unlock the mysteries of the universe."

The comings and goings of top AI talents are no longer news, but it's quite rare for someone like Igor to directly jump from research to venture capital.

Common destinations for other peers are to switch to other companies. For example, two other big names from xAI's founding team, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy, did just that. Or they start new AI companies. For instance, Ilya Sutskever, the co - founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, and Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer, both founded their own AI companies.

Even among top talents who shift from AI research to venture capital, they are usually older than Igor.

You know, although Igor has a long list of achievements and a rich resume, judging from public information, he is only about 35 years old.

Maybe the answer lies in his "farewell speech" on X - Musk taught him to "always maintain an almost crazy sense of urgency." As a top AI talent, Igor knows that the most urgent matter at present is the upcoming AGI.

Rather than just being a part of history, it's better to create it. Working for a single AI company is no longer enough to fulfill this desire, and venture capital is the right path.

01

"Without you, there would be no xAI today."

Igor's "farewell speech" is quite long. Translated into Chinese, it's nearly 1,500 words. The writing is simple and every sentence is sincere, with a touch of tearful goodbye.

Most likely, Musk also felt a lot. In the comment section, he said: "Thank you for helping to build xAI! Without you, we wouldn't be where we are today."

This is true. Igor is indeed a key figure for xAI.

In 2023, xAI was founded, and the founding team consisted of 12 people. In the relevant list published on the official website, Igor's name closely followed Musk's. This is both an affirmation of Igor and an affirmation of Musk's AI startup.

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

As a child, Igor admired scientists like Richard Feynman, who constantly pushed the boundaries of physics to understand the mysteries of the universe. Naturally, after growing up, he entered the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany to study physics and then became a doctoral student in particle physics at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research).

During that period, Igor also realized that it was becoming increasingly difficult to make new physical discoveries, requiring larger and larger colliders while yielding fewer new findings. So he began to think that perhaps the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe lies not in larger colliders but in super - intelligence.

The turning point in his career is clearly shown in his LinkedIn resume. After CERN, he moved on to DeepMind.

In 2017, Google had already acquired DeepMind for three years. DeepMind had already made Google's investment worthwhile. AlphaGo, built on a combination of deep neural networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), defeated the world - renowned Go master Lee Sedol.

After Igor joined, he led a project called AlphaStar. Then, DeepMind amazed the world again. Through mechanisms such as imitation learning, self - play, and multi - agent systems, AlphaStar played against human players on the real "StarCraft" game servers and reached the "Grandmaster" level.

First, using AI to defeat the world Go master, and then having AI defeat humans in a game, DeepMind and Google solidified their positions in the AI field.

Not only that, Igor also participated in the WaveNet project, a high - fidelity speech synthesis technology based on deep neural networks, widely used in the field of speech generation.

After working at DeepMind for nearly four years, Igor entered a period of "jumping back and forth."

From November 2020 to February 2023, Igor first jumped from DeepMind to OpenAI and then jumped back to DeepMind in April 2022.

Of course, Igor left his mark in each of these career experiences.

During his time at OpenAI, Igor participated in the Codex project, a language model based on GPT, fine - tuned on publicly available GitHub code and specifically used for Python code generation. Codex directly drove the productization of GitHub Copilot. In addition, Igor also participated in the development of GPT - 4.

When he returned to Google's DeepMind, Igor participated in the AlphaCode project, responsible for prototype development and infrastructure building.

At the beginning of 2023, OpenAI's ChatGPT was released, triggering a new global AI wave, and this one was more powerful than any before.

Instead of going back to OpenAI again, Igor accepted Musk's offer and joined this brand - new startup, xAI.

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

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

The Colossus cluster was built in 122 days, containing 100,000 NVIDIA H100s, breaking the industry record and providing super - computing power for xAI's large models. Grok has iterated to the fourth generation in 28 months, becoming a direct threat to OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini. The market value of xAI has exceeded $50 billion after one and a half years of establishment. Now, after the merger with X and the start of a new round of financing, xAI's valuation is expected to reach $200 billion.

02

The Silicon Valley Iron Man and the Melancholic Russian

When recalling the past of joining xAI, Igor mentioned that he had a long conversation with Musk for several hours, and both of them felt that "it is necessary to have a new AI company with a different mission."

This statement is quite subtle. Different from whom exactly does "a different mission" refer to? And why is it necessary?

Musk's stance is no secret. He (claims to) believes that AGI should not fall into the hands of technology giants like Google, so he participated in founding OpenAI. Later, he thought that OpenAI deviated from its original intention and mission, so he angrily parted ways. Before founding xAI in 2023, Musk also publicly attacked OpenAI's "hypocrisy" several times, accusing it of submitting to Microsoft and becoming a "puppet."

In this case, the "new AI company with a different mission" is likely to be different from technology giants like Google and Microsoft, as well as from startups like OpenAI that rely on giants.

"Elon has been warning about the potential risks of powerful AI for years. I and Elon realized that we share the same vision of 'using AI for the benefit of humanity.'"

Many people now doubt Musk's claim that he cares about all of humanity. But we have reason to believe that like many other top AI talents, Igor is truly excited and fearful about AGI and is really driven by the "mission."

Presumably, Igor was born in the late 1980s, at the end of the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union disintegrated, his parents left Russia and immigrated to the United States.

There is a Russian word "toska," which is a complex emotional concept. As the literary master Vladimir Nabokov put it, it's difficult to fully convey the essence of this word in English. If we have to describe it, toska is an indescribable melancholy, a deep - seated nostalgia, or a spiritual depression. It goes beyond simple sadness, combining longing, emptiness, and existential anxiety.

Interestingly, this "toska - like melancholy" still lingers in Russian - born immigrants and even their descendants. Among Russian - born top AI talents, this "toska - like melancholy" has evolved into a deep concern about the control, safety, and future well - being of humanity regarding AGI.

Another well - known Russian - born researcher is Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI. He has a high reputation in the industry. He is one of the developers of the revolutionary convolutional neural network AlexNet and one of the founders of the Transformer and GPT models.

Meanwhile, like his former teacher, the "godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton, he is also deeply worried about the future of AI. When OpenAI was moving forward at full speed and CEO Sam Altman was sparing no effort to boost the company's commercial value, Sutskever said: "Humans can lie, hide intentions (alignment), and do so for years. Why can't AGI? It might be difficult to detect."

As we all know, after a high - level upheaval at OpenAI, Sutskever was silent for a long time and then left to found a company focused on artificial intelligence safety.

During his time at xAI, Igor worked very hard.

As the 120 - day deadline for building the Memphis supercomputing cluster was approaching, xAI encountered a series of mysterious problems - the communication between clusters via RDMA always failed. Musk decided to fly to the data center in person, and Igor and the rest of the team followed suit.

Igor recalled that the infrastructure team arrived in Memphis in the middle of the night and immediately got to work. After going through tens of thousands of lines of lspci output, they finally found the root of the problem - an incorrect BIOS setting.

Finally, the error was fixed, and the training tasks ran smoothly. Musk posted a celebration at 4:20 am, and