"Jimmy Ba, a cofounder who led research and safety efforts at the company, announced his departure on Tuesday via an X post that thanked Musk and said he would "continue to stay close as a friend of the team." His exit followed hours after Monday's departure of Tony Wu, another cofounder who had led the company's reasoning team. Several other members of xAI's technical staff, including Hang Gao, have also announced their departures in the past week."
"The fresh exits mean that xAI's founding team has now been cut in half, with six of the original 12 members now gone. Five of those exits occurred within the past year alone, including Kyle Kosic, who oversaw infrastructure before jumping to OpenAI in mid-2024, and Christian Szegedy, a former Google engineer who left last February. Igor Babuschkin also left in August last year to launch his own venture capital firm, while Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoft, departed last month for health-related reasons."
"The exact reasons for the departures are unclear, but Musk has just merged the AI company with his rocket company, SpaceX, in a consolidation of his business empire. Musk has characterized the merger as part of his ambitious vision to launch a network of data-center satellites capable of running advanced AI models from space. But some more skeptical of the merger have pointed out that it also provides a solution for xAI's massive capital requirements for chips, electricity,"
xAI has lost two cofounders and at least six other researchers in recent weeks, including Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu. The founding team has been reduced from 12 to six members, with five departures occurring within the past year. Notable departures include Kyle Kosic, Christian Szegedy, Igor Babuschkin, and Greg Yang. High turnover in the AI industry is common, but the concentration and scale of exits at xAI stand out. The company recently merged with SpaceX, a move framed as pursuing data-center satellites to run advanced AI models and potentially addressing large capital needs.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]