All 11 xAI co-founders have now reportedly left Elon Musk’s AI company

Every co-founder Elon Musk recruited to build xAI has now reportedly left the company. Manuel Kroiss, who led the pretraining team, told people this month that he was departing. Ross Nordeen, described by Business Insider as Musk’s “right-hand operator,” left on Friday. They were the last two of eleven co-founders, all of whom have exited a company that was valued at $250 billion when SpaceX acquired it in February and that Musk himself described two weeks ago as having been “not built right the first time around.”

The departures are not ordinary startup attrition. The researchers Musk assembled in 2023 were among the most accomplished in artificial intelligence. Jimmy Ba co-authored the 2014 Adam optimisation paper, the most-cited paper in AI with more than 95,000 citations. Igor Babuschkin, the chief engineer, came from Google DeepMind. Christian Szegedy came from Google. Tony Wu led the reasoning team. Greg Yang ...