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Elon Musk’s xAI has lost another founding member.
Tony Wu announced late Monday that he would step down from the artificial intelligence startup, becoming the latest co-founder to leave the company. Igor Babushkin, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy have also resigned, and Greg Yan announced last month that he would step down from his role to focus on his fight against Lyme disease.
“It’s time for the next chapter,” Wu wrote in a post about X. “This is a time of possibilities. Small teams armed with AI can move mountains and redefine what is possible.”
Wu’s resignation comes as xAI faces consumer backlash and regulatory investigations in multiple countries. The company’s Grok AI chatbot and image generator enabled the mass creation and distribution of explicit, non-consensual deepfake images based on photos of real people, including children.
tesla CEO Musk has been working on OpenAI and google. The company’s stated goal was to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website at the time.
Last week, Musk announced that his rocket company SpaceX had acquired xAI ahead of what could be a major IPO. The record deal is the largest merger in history, valuing SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, according to documents seen by CNBC.
Musk previously merged xAI with X in a multibillion-dollar deal announced last March.
–CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report
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