Nearly half of xAI’s founding team has now left the company

On Monday night, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, co-founder of xAI, announced that he was leaving the company. “It’s time for the next chapter,” Wu wrote. At a late night job On

This in itself is a standard announcement of a technology leaving, but it is part of a worrying pattern in the lab. Five members The company’s founding team of 12 people They have now left the company, with four arriving in the past year alone. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosich left for OpenAI in mid-2024, followed by Google veteran Christian Szegedy in February 2025. Last August, Igor Babushkin left He left to found a venture companyMicrosoft graduate Greg Yang left just last month. Citing health issues.

By all accounts, the splits were all amicable, and there are plenty of reasons why some founders might decide to move on, nearly three years later. Elon Musk is a very demanding president, and with SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI completed and an IPO pending in the coming months, everyone involved has very big gains coming. It’s a great time to fundraise for an AI startup, so it’s only natural that high-profile researchers will want to strike out on their own.

There are also less friendly reasons that may be taken into consideration. The company’s flagship product, the Grok chatbot, has suffered antic and Clear internal manipulation – The kind of thing that could easily create friction with the technical team. Then there were the recent changes to xAI’s image creation tools The platform was flooded with deep porntriggering a slow but real movement Legal consequences.

Whatever the cause, the cumulative effect is worrying. There’s a lot of work left in xAI, and the IPO will bring more scrutiny than the lab has faced before. With musk already Preparing plans for orbital data centersThe pressure to implement these plans will be intense. The pace of model development is not slowing down, and if Grok can’t keep up with the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic, the IPO could easily suffer.

In short, the stakes are high, and XAI needs to retain all the AI ​​talent it can.