Elon Musk's xAI loses another cofounder
Jae C. Hong/AP
- Another xAI cofounder has left Elon Musk's AI startup.
- Tony Wu said he has resigned from the company and thanked Musk "for the ride of a lifetime."
- Wu is the fourth cofounder to leave the company over the past year.
One of xAI's cofounders, Tony Wu, has left Elon Musk's AI company.
Wu said in a post on X on Tuesday that he has resigned from the company.
"It's time for my next chapter," Wu wrote. "It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible."
"And to Elon @elonmusk - thank you for believing in the mission and for the ride of a lifetime," he added.
Wu is the fourth cofounder to leave the company over the past year. Christian Szegedy left the company in February, according to his LinkedIn. Igor Babuschkin announced he'd left the company in August, and Greg Yang said last month that he'd taken a step back from the company due to health concerns.
Before joining the company, Wu worked at Google for nearly two years and interned at OpenAI, according to his LinkedIn profile.
xAI was launched in 2023. Musk has said the company and its Grok chatbot will serve as an alternative to what he deems "woke" chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Since then, Musk has merged the company with his social media company X. Last week, Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, acquired xAI.
The company is reportedly gearing up for an initial public offering this year that could value SpaceX at $1.5 trillion.
xAI has come under fire in recent months after its chatbot, Grok, was found to have generated nonconsensual sexual images of real people. The backlash prompted the company to restrict Grok's image-generation features on X.
French authorities last week raided xAI's Paris office as part of an investigation following reports that Grok was used to create sexually explicit deepfakes.
xAI and Wu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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