Igor Babuschkin, who co-founded Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI in 2023 and led its engineering teams, said on 13 August that he has left the company. In a post on X, the 32-year-old engineer announced the launch of Babuschkin Ventures, a fund that will back research and startups focused on building artificial intelligence that is “safe and beneficial to humanity.” Babuschkin played a central role in developing xAI’s Grok chatbot and in assembling the Memphis, Tennessee supercomputer that underpins the firm’s model-training work. Before joining Musk, he worked on DeepMind’s AlphaStar project and held research positions at OpenAI, experience he says shaped his conviction that safety must keep pace with rapid advances in generative models. His exit follows the recent departures of xAI’s legal head Robert Keele and, in July, former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino, underscoring continued turnover across Musk-linked companies even as competition with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic intensifies. xAI has not named a successor, and neither the company nor Musk has commented on how the change might affect its product roadmap.