You may not be familiar with Igor Babuschkin, but he is the co-founder of xAI with Elon Musk in 2023. Although not as famous as Musk, Babuschkin is the head of engineering at xAI and was previously the lead developer of AlphaStar at Google DeepMind. Earlier this morning at X, he announced that he was leaving xAI to start a new company, Babuschkin Ventures.
Babuschkin Ventures is a startup that does artificial intelligence (AI) security research and will support companies that develop AI and agents to advance human civilization.
According to Babuschkin, the decision to leave xAI came after a meeting with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute. During the meeting, he was asked about how he could safely develop AI to ensure that children in the future can continue to thrive.
Despite leaving xAI unexpectedly, Elon Musk thanked Babuschkin for building the company. xAI and Tesla have lost several top executives in a row over the past year. Just a week ago the Dojo supercomputer team at Tesla was disbanded after the team leader and 20 other staff members quit to form their own AI company.