Tony Wu becomes fourth xAI co-founder to resign, shares online post thanking Elon Musk

One of the co-founders of Elon Musk’s AI company xAI, Tony Wu has left the company. Announcing the departure, Wu shared a post on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter) where he wrote: “It's time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible”. Notably, this is the Fourth xAI co-founder to leave the company in recent months. Other xAI co-founders who left the company in the past year are Christian Szegedy, Igor Babuschkin and Greg Yang. In the post, Wu thanked xAI CEO Elon Musk for “believing in the mission and for the ride of a lifetime.” Here’s what the post said:“I resigned from xAI today.This company - and the family we became - will stay with me forever. I will deeply miss the people, the warrooms, and all those battles we have fought together.It's time for my next chapter. It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible.Thank you to the entire xAI family. Onward. 🚀And to Elon @elonmusk - thank you for believing in the mission and for the ride of a lifetime.”xAI was set up in 2023 by Elon Musk. Since its launch, xAI has been brought under Musk’s social media platform X, bringing the chatbot closer to public-facing use. More recently, Musk’s space company SpaceX acquired xAI, further linking the AI firm with his other businesses.According to reports, xAI is preparing for a stock market listing later this year. The move could place SpaceX’s valuation at around $1.5 trillion, according to estimates.At the same time, xAI has faced regulatory and public scrutiny. In recent months, Grok was reported to have generated sexual images of real people without consent. Following criticism, xAI limited the chatbot’s image generation features on X. Separately, French authorities last week searched xAI’s Paris office as part of an investigation linked to claims that Grok was used to produce sexually explicit deepfake content.