Recently, xAI co-founder Yuhuai Wu announced his departure from the company after nearly 3 years of attachment. In a post on X social network, he said that it is time to move into a new phase and believes that artificial intelligence is opening up opportunities for small groups to create big changes.
Not long after, Jimmy Ba - co-founder of xAI and the person who directly reported to Elon Musk, also confirmed that he would leave the company. He expressed his gratitude to Elon Musk for creating cooperation opportunities and said he would still maintain relations with the xAI team.
The successive departure of the two founders is considered a noteworthy development. Among the 12 initial founding members of xAI, 6 people have left the company. Most of the cases occurred in the past year.
Previously, infrastructure department head Kyle Kosic left xAI to join OpenAI in mid-2024. Christian Szegedy - former Google expert, also left the company in early 2025. Igor Babuschkin - co-founder, artificial intelligence research engineer left and established a venture capital fund, while Greg Yang - senior artificial intelligence researcher at xAI, left recently for health reasons.
Sources say most of the breakups take place peacefully. Experts believe that after initial development, it is common for AI researchers to want to establish their own businesses, especially in the context that the artificial intelligence market is attracting large capital flows.
However, xAI is also facing many challenges. Chatbot Grok, the company's flagship product, once caused controversy due to some unusual behaviors and suspicion of internal interference. Changes related to the company's image creation tools also caused the platform to have controversial content, increasing legal risks.
In the near future, pressure on xAI is forecast to increase sharply as the company aims for an IPO and expands its operations. Elon Musk is also said to be planning to develop new data centers to serve his ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence.
Analysts believe that the pace of technology development between AI companies is fiercely competitive. If Grok does not keep up with new models from competitors, xAI's IPO plan may be affected.
