Elon Musk announced his new company xAI which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images<\/p>\n
Elon Musk’s<\/a>\u00a0xAI has lost its second co-founder in two days.<\/p>\n Influential researcher Jimmy Ba on Tuesday announced his departure in a post<\/a> on X, thanking Musk and writing that he was, “Grateful to have helped cofound at the start.”<\/p>\n Ba’s departure comes just one day after fellow co-founder Tony Wu announced<\/a> his own exit from xAI, which merged<\/a> with Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX earlier this month. The xAI co-founder exodus comes as SpaceX prepares to go public<\/a> sometime this year. <\/p>\n A University of Toronto professor, Ba was credited for critical research that influenced the company’s Grok version 4 AI models. Besides Ba and Wu, other co-founders including\u00a0Igor Babuschkin<\/a>, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy, have also departed Musk’s artificial intelligence venture.\u00a0Greg Yang<\/a>\u00a0announced last month that he would be stepping back from his role to focus on his battle with Lyme disease.<\/p>\n The record-setting, all-stock deal valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, according to\u00a0documents viewed<\/a>\u00a0by CNBC. Musk previously used xAI to acquire his social network X, formerly Twitter, in another all-stock transaction announced in March 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n The departures also come as xAI faces\u00a0regulatory probes<\/a>\u00a0in multiple jurisdictions across Europe, Asia and the U.S. <\/p>\n The probes were initiated after the company’s Grok AI<\/a> chatbot and image generator allowed mass-creation and syndication of non-consensual, explicit images, colloquially known as deepfake porn. The images were based on photos of real people, including children.<\/p>\n Musk launched xAI in 2023 alongside 11 other people in an effort to compete against OpenAI<\/a> and\u00a0Google<\/a>. The company’s stated goal was to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website at the time. \u00a0<\/p>\n The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n