Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI is experiencing something of an exodus. The company has lost two cofounders and at least six other researchers in the last few weeks, according to public posts from employees.
Jimmy Ba, a cofounder who led research and safety efforts at the company, announced his departure on Tuesday via an X post that thanked Musk and said he would “continue to stay close as a friend of the team.” His exit followed hours after Monday’s departure of Tony Wu, another cofounder who had led the company’s reasoning team. Several other members of xAI’s technical staff, including Hang Gao, have also announced their departures in the last week.
The fresh exits mean that xAI’s founding team has now been cut in half, with six of the original 12 members now gone. Five of those exits occurred within the past year alone, including Kyle Kosic, who oversaw infrastructure before jumping to OpenAI in mid-2024, and Christian Szegedy, a former Google engineer who left last February. Igor Babuschkin also left in August last year to launch his own venture capital firm, while Greg Yang, who previously worked at Microsoft, departed last month for health-related reasons.
High turnover in the AI industry has not been unusual in recent months—with researchers often jumping ship to rival labs or leaving to start their own ventures—but the scale of the exits at xAI is unusual. Representatives for xAI did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment on the departures.
