There seems to be a bit of an exodus of talent happening at xAI.
xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba is the latest co-founder to depart the company. His departure follows the exit of Tony Wu yesterday and Greg Yang’s stepping aside three weeks ago. With Jimmy Ba’s exit, six of the original 12 co-founders of xAI — founded only in 2023 — have now left.
Last day at xAI,” Ba said on X. “xAI’s mission is push humanity up the Kardashev tech tree. Grateful to have helped cofound at the start. And enormous thanks to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. So proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to stay close as a friend of the team. Thank you all for the grind together. The people and camaraderie are the real treasures at this place,” he added.
Ba hinted that AI would dramatically change the world this year. “We are heading to an age of 100x productivity with the right tools. Recursive self improvement loops likely go live in the next 12mo. It’s time to recalibrate my gradient on the big picture. 2026 is gonna be insane and likely the busiest (and most consequential) year for the future of our species,” he wrote.
Jimmy Ba was a significant name in the AI world. He’d co-authored the Adam optimizer, which trains virtually every large language model on earth, and co-invented Layer Normalization, a core building block inside every transformer architecture, including Grok. He’d completed his PhD under Geoffrey Hinton, and has 300,000+ citations.
Prior to Ba’s departure, xAI had seen the exits of Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic, Christian Szegedy, Greg Yang and Tony Wu. Babuschkin left in August 2025 to launch Babuschkin Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on safe AI development. Kosic departed in 2024 to join OpenAI, while Szegedy also left in 2024 for a position at Morph Labs. Greg Yang departed last month citing health issues after a Lupus diagnosis. Wu had quit yesterday, with Ba quitting today.
The AI world is no stranger to co-founder exits. OpenAI has experienced the most dramatic exodus, with eight of its eleven original co-founders having left the company. Departed founders include Elon Musk himself, Ilya Sutskever (who went on to found Safe Superintelligence Inc.), John Schulman (now at Thinking Machines), and Durk Kingma (now at Anthropic).
Thinking Machines, co-founded by former OpenAI CEO Mira Murati, has lost three of its six co-founders—Barrett Zoph, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz. Safe Superintelligence Inc. has seen one of its three co-founders, Daniel Gross, depart for Meta in 2025. Even the more established Google DeepMind experienced founder attrition when Mustafa Suleyman left to lead AI initiatives at Microsoft.
Against this backdrop of widespread departures, Anthropic stands as the sole major AI laboratory to retain its entire founding team. All seven co-founders who established the company in 2021—including CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei—continue to work at the organization, a rarity in an industry marked by volatility and competitive poaching.