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Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of xAI, has announced his departure
- chollida1 1y ago2 years doesn't seem like a very long time to stay at a company you founded. I can only imagine what would cause someone to make such a drastic move. If he's going into Venture Capital then he has no problem with the workload. Elon seems very talented at finding trends and convincing talented people to help him build the future. He seems equally talented at then pushing these same people away.
- guywithahat 1y agoI would argue one moves to the VC world to lower the workload; I suspect there's a reason so many people seemingly retire into it
- VladVladikoff 1y agoHasn’t xAI already accomplished its goal? Milk some 50B of capital out of the AI hype bubble. Didn’t I read some story a month or two ago about Elon bank rolling some other projects off of the xAI valuation.
- stephen_g 1y agoOne thing was that he shuffled what was once Twitter into xAI ownership in an all-stock transaction, so that the people who bankrolled the Twitter purchase can pretend that they have stock that's worth something for now, instead of having to write down the value of those shares.
- Hamuko 1y agoI have a hard time taking xAI seriously as a company considering how Elon seems to treat it as an accounting strategy and not as an independent company.
- spwa4 1y agoElon Musk's claim to fame is that he "helped create" (although the actual stories are more along the lines of "stopped sabotaging") paypal, which is a bank. An internet bank focusing on enabling payment to first Ebay, then merchants in general. And you can tell by his later takeovers. He took over Tesla, and absurdly financialized it. He took over SpaceX, and absurdly overleveraged it. That is what he does, any technical chops are for show. He's an accidental banker with a gimmick: ketamine can make you believe anything! Politico.eu collected Musk's latest results [1]. Out of what Musk and Trump promised [2], Musk first lowered his promises himself (after getting the money, sorry, the election) from 2000 billion (2 trillion) to 180 billion, a 91% reduction. He didn't make anywhere close to those savings, his organisation then made a further reduction in his promise to 52.8 billion, missing the promised target by 97.36%. But those appear to be inflated claims and actually verified savings only amount to 1.4 billion, 99.93% less than Musk initially promised. BUT ... Then Trump was going to NOT spend this money. How's that going? Well, in order to NOT spend 1.4 billion dollars, Musk and Trump have spent 7.4 trillion taxpayer dollars. Hey, you missed "saving" by a tiny bit there, Elon. So Musk, who promised to save the us government 2000 billion dollars, has in fact "saved" the government MINUS 7400 billion dollars. As always, Musk's direct contribution is barely a rounding error. This number is not counting, of course, what he personally received from the US government which will comfortably put the cost of doing business with Musk for the US government over 8000 billion dollars. I guess that's one way to become "the richest man in the world" (even though I wouldn't trade $1000 of my money for all Tesla shares in existence, so is he really? I mean, maybe $100 for bragging rights, but they don't even come with a certificate anymore) Let's just say that anyone expecting investments with Mr. Musk to pay off is not just crazy, that is WAY past dangerous insanity. Even his supposed "high-tech" achievements ... well, here's a summary [3]. TLDR: 99.97% miss in performance for Musk's latest project. Total cost to taxpayers of Mr. Musk: over 8000 billion dollars. [1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/trump-doge-contract-claims-savings-inflation-00498178 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/trump-doge-contract... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4j33klz33o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4j33klz33o [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B71PNEwhyXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B71PNEwhyXc
- kangs 1y agolooks like to me he cashed out and wanted to own his own company, so he did
- lwo32k 1y ago"Talent" in a tech firm is overrated, because what tech firms do is over rated.
- DustinBrett 1y agoHe said in the post, he is scared AI is going off the rails and needs to focus on safety. Probably too late anyway.
- thrown-0825 1y agoHes just moving on to the next stage of the grift: VC.
- MortyWaves 1y agoHN only really seems to exist as a funnel for VC, but I don’t think us saying it’s all a grift will be a popular move ha.
- 8note 1y agoas long as everyone understands the grift and uses it together, is there a problem?
- thrown-0825 1y agoI think you might have an incorrect understanding of what grift means. It is a swindle by definition.
- ml-anon 1y agoThis post is greater fool theory in action.
- thrown-0825 1y agoRich people lacking self awareness is nothing new.
- sjemoo 1y ago[dead]
- b0sk 1y agoHe's the guy that blamed an ex-OpenAI employee after one of many Grok's fails https://fortune.com/2025/02/24/xai-chief-engineer-blames-former-openai-employee-grok-blocks-musk-trump-misinformation/ https://fortune.com/2025/02/24/xai-chief-engineer-blames-for...
- elcritch 1y agoxAIs prompts are open?! Wow that's pretty impressive.
- pavlov 1y agoIn the same sense that DOGE's receipts are open. They publish something that looks good, and the reality is something else.
- DaSHacka 1y agoSo they don't actually publish the correct prompts, and are just lying? Do you have a source for that?
- pavlov 1y agoA "rogue employee" [1] at xAI recently tweaked the prompts to make Grok talk about "white genocide" in South Africa in response to completely unrelated queries: https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-south-africa-64ce5f240061ca0b88d5af4c424e1f3b https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-south-africa-64ce5f240061... These modifications didn't seem to get reflected in the published xAI prompts. - - [1] Musk himself, obviously
- Grimblewald 1y agoI have no faith in elon products for one simple reason: if you have talent you have options and if you have options, why would anything elon has tainted be anywhere near the top? There was a time it was reasonable, early space x days for example, when elon was still managable, easily abstracted away and you were able to work with better funding and less red tape vs other options - but modern times i cannot see a reason one would work with elon unless desperate or in the cult, and lets be honest, you dont reason your way into joining cults.
- roncesvalles 1y agoBecause the world has random error and not all incredibly talented people are correctly identified and picked up by the OpenAIs and Anthropics.
- Grimblewald 1y agoOpenAI isnt exactly a top choice anymore either.
- abxyz 1y agoA lot of (talented people in a field) are idiots / irrational in other parts of their life. A very talented engineer with options may buy in to Elon’s public vision (which sounds good on the surface) and may be completely incapable of recognizing when someone is betraying their vision. Very smart people get caught up in nonsense all the time.
- ActorNightly 1y agoIf you consider actual intelligent people, this isn't true. Intelligence is about dealing with information and interpreting it in correct ways - what domain that information comes from, whether politics, social issues, or coding or engineering, is irrelevant. Most people really just DGAF about politics in US. The (few) smart people working for Elon are those who are really into whatever technology and just like to play with toys while getting paid. I used to work with such a dude a few jobs back in my aerospace days, guy was multi talented across both software and hardware, and could easily be making bank at Apple Amazon Google in one of their edge programs, but was content with getting paid like 80k a year in 2010s in a fairly high CoL area with an hour commute all because he got to play with a rather big UAV.
- apical_dendrite 1y agoThere's a lot of internal contradiction in his message. One the one hand, he wants to "have a maniacal sense of urgency" and on the other, he thinks that it's "critical to study and advance AI safety... to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity". If you're building something that you think is so powerful that you fear for the safety of humanity, then why are you building it at "blistering velocity"? Shouldn't you be taking a more careful approach and studying the impact of what you're building, and then only releasing it if you know it's safe? How do you do that if you are under constant pressure to move faster than everyone else?
- profstasiak 1y agoyou're making a fundamental mistake of expecting sillicon valley people to make sense
- Zigurd 1y agoFake urgency is the hallmark of shite CEOs.
- donperignon 1y agoThis message doesnt make any sense.
- ml-anon 1y ago[flagged]
- sjemoo 1y ago[dead]
- ai-anon 1y ago[dead]
- momocowcow 1y agoWhy the downvotes on this one?
- mattigames 1y agoBirds of a feather https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flig...
- piker 1y ago> The Santa Clara District Attorney's office decided not to bring formal charges against Babuschkin following the arrest, Cynthia Sumida, the public information officer at the DA's office, told Insider. Not even alleged by the state.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- borkenstein 1y agoThrowaway. Can confirm he's a domestic abuser. When deciding where to go after DeepMind, xAI wasn't even on my radar because I knew about this guy.
- rideontime 1y ago"Confirm" implies that others have suggested this? To be clear, my bias is to believe you, but I'd like to have more evidence, or at least more corroboration. e: Ah, flagged and dead. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44897047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44897047
- frakt0x90 1y agoThis is what I could find: https://nypost.com/2023/04/20/elon-musk-ai-researcher-igor-babuschkin-arrested-for-domestic-violence/ https://nypost.com/2023/04/20/elon-musk-ai-researcher-igor-b...
- rideontime 1y agoSo it is indisputable fact that he was arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence, and that the police report indicated a "minor injury."