xAI co-founder leaves Elon Musk’s AI startup to launch AI safety fund, joining wave of executive departures

Building AI that advances humanity has been my lifelong dream. My parents left the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR in search of a better life for their kids. Life wasn’t always easy as immigrants. Despite the hardships, my parents believed that human values were priceless: values like courage, compassion, curiosity for understanding the world. As a child, I admired scientists like Richard Feynman and Max Planck, who relentlessly pushed the frontiers of physics in order to understand the universe. As a particle physics PhD student at CERN I was excited to contribute to that mission. But the search for new physics was getting harder and harder, requiring bigger and bigger colliders, while new discoveries kept getting fewer. So I began to wonder if superintelligence, not larger colliders, could be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Could AI develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity? Could AI prove the Riemann hypothesis? In early 2023 I became convinced that we were getting close to a recipe for superintelligence. I saw the writing on the wall: very soon AI could reason beyond the level of humans. How could we ensure that this technology is used for good? Elon had warned of the dangers of powerful AI for years. Elon and I realized that we had a shared vision of AI used to benefit humanity, thus we recruited more like minded engineers and set off to build xAI.

The early days of xAI were not easy. Naysayers told us that we arrived too late to the game, so starting a top AI company from scratch would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Starting a company from zero required lots of hands-on work. In the beginning I built many of the foundational tools used at the company to launch and manage training jobs. I later oversaw much of the engineering at the company, including Infrastructure, Product and Applied AI projects. xAI’s people are deeply dedicated. Through blood sweat and tears, our team’s blistering velocity built the Memphis supercluster, and shipped frontier models faster than any company in history. I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency.

xAI executes at ludicrous speed. Industry veterans told us that building the Memphis supercluster in 120 days would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Our goal was to get our training setup running at scale on the Memphis cluster ASAP. Towards the end of our 120 day deadline, we were riddled with mysterious issues with communicating over RDMA between the machines. Elon decided to fly to the datacenter, and we followed. Our infra team landed in Memphis in the middle of the night and got straight to work. After pouring through tens of thousands of lines of lspci output we finally identified a wrong BIOS setting, the root of the problem. Elon was there with us until late into the night. When the training run finally worked, Elon posted our triumph at “4:20am” causing us to laugh out loud. I will never forget the rush of adrenaline that night, and the emotional bonds that we were all in this together. We went to bed feeling like we were living through the most exhilarating time of our lives.

I have enormous love for the whole family at xAI. Our team is truly special – you’re the most dedicated people I’ve ever worked with. Catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy. It was made possible by everyone’s diehard grit and team spirit. Thank you to every single person who joined me on this adventure. I want to honor your contributions, your time, your sacrifices, which are never easy. I will always remember working together far into the nights and burning the midnight oil. I will never forget the sacrifices and contributions you’ve made. As I drive away today, I feel like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college. My heart is brimming with tears of joy, rooting for the company as it grows and matures.

As I’m heading towards my next chapter, I’m inspired by how my parents immigrated to seek a better world for their children. Recently I had dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute. He showed me a photo of his young sons, and asked me “how can we build AI safely to ensure that our children can flourish?” I was deeply moved by his question. Earlier in my career, I was a technical lead for DeepMind’s Alphastar StarCraft agent, and I got to see how powerful reinforcement learning is when scaled up. As frontier models become more agentic over longer horizons and a wider range of tasks, they will take on more and more powerful capabilities, which will make it critical to study and advance AI safety. I want to continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity. I’m announcing the launch of Babuschkin Ventures, which supports AI safety research and backs startups in AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe. Please reach out at ventures@babuschk.in if you want to chat. The singularity is near, but humanity’s future is bright!”