Musk's AI dream encounters "founder exodus": Half of xAI startup team has left, internal conflicts surface.

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI announced that two co-founders are resigning. Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba posted on social media that they have stepped down from their positions at the company, which Musk co-founded less than three years ago. It is reported that both Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba are graduates of the University of Toronto, with Tony Wu previously working at Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US). They were among the 12 co-founders of xAI when it was established in 2023, and their departure is the latest case of core team members leaving xAI, with now half of the original 12 co-founders having left. Previously, Kyle Kosic left in 2024, and Igor Babuschkin and Christian Szegedy left last year. Another co-founder, Greg Yang, announced last month that he would step back due to being diagnosed with Lyme disease. Reports indicate that Jimmy Ba's departure is due to tensions within the technical team over the requirements to improve AI model performance. Musk is focusing on pushing the company to catch up with competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. As of now, Jimmy Ba has not commented on the reports on the x platform. Both individuals did not disclose the reasons for their resignation or their future career plans in their statements on the x platform, but they expressed their gratitude to Musk. Prior to this personnel change at xAI, Musk's space exploration technology company SpaceX, under his ownership, had just announced the acquisition of xAI. The merged new company is valued at $1.25 trillion and plans to go public later this year, providing financial support for Musk's ambitious plan to create a space data center.