Meet the power players at Elon Musk's xAI, the startup taking on OpenAI with its Grok chatbot

• Elon Musk's startup xAI has attracted top talent since launching in July 2023.
• xAI has raised more than $12 billion and is valued at $50 billion.
• Its founding members have previous experience at the likes of Google, OpenAI and Tesla.

Elon Musk's startup xAI is one of the newer players in the artificial intelligence race, but that hasn't stopped it from bringing in top talent and soaring to a valuation of $50 billion in just 16 months.

Launched by Musk in July 2023 to take on OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, xAI's lofty goal is to "understand the universe."

The startup began with a team of 12 people who, prior to joining Musk's latest moonshot, worked at the likes of Google DeepMind, Tesla, OpenAI, and Microsoft. It has raised a total of $12 billion, including a $6 billion funding round that closed in December.

Since its launch, xAI has released a chatbot called Grok, which is now free for everyone to use. Some of its latest features include web search results, PDF upload, image understanding, and the ability to summarize conversations and understand posts. It has also rolled out an image-generating tool.

Grok has been trained on user data from X, the company formerly known as Twitter, which Musk also owns. That dynamic has given xAI a competitive advantage but also triggered an investigation from Europe's lead privacy regulator, resulting in X making concessions on some user data.

To compete with rivals like OpenAI and Google, xAI plans to tenfold the size of its Memphis supercomputer, which trains its AI models. The xAI team built the supercomputer, called Colossus, at breakneck speed, and it's already considered the largest of its kind in the world.

Meet the key figures at xAI who are driving the startup's rapid growth.

Igor Babuschkin

Babuschkin, a founding member of xAI, spent three years as a research engineer at Google DeepMind before he joined OpenAI. He returned to Google DeepMind for nearly a year, then left for xAI.

In a livestreamed conversation with Musk and others on X Spaces in July 2023, Babuschkin said he was originally a physicist and briefly worked at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most advanced particle accelerator.

During that conversation, Babuschkin said he's "always been very passionate" about understanding the universe and then became interested in the deep machine learning and AI fields, and decided to make a career switch.

He added, "I was very passionate about language models and making them do impressive things, and now I've teamed up with Elon to see if we can actually deploy these new technologies to really make a dent in our understanding of the universe and progress our collective knowledge."

Manuel Kroiss

Kroiss previously worked as an engineer at Google DeepMind and coauthored several research papers on machine learning, the most recent being: "Launchpad: A programming model for distributed machine learning research."

Yuhuai (Tony) Wu

Wu previously worked at Google and Google DeepMind and spent a few months as a research scientist intern at OpenAI. He also spent over a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

Wu said in the 2023 X Spaces livestream that his dream has been to tackle the most difficult problems in mathematics and AI. He has also coauthored a number of research papers on machine learning and large language models.

Wu has a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of New Brunswick and a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Toronto.

Christian Szegedy

Szegedy joined xAI from Google, where he spent 14 years of his career. His last role there was as a staff research scientist.

Szegedy holds a master's degree in mathematics and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from The University of Bonn.

In a fireside chat with Nvidia data scientist Bojan Tunguz earlier this year, Szegedy said he had worked on chip design for 12 years.

Then, in 2010, at the age of 40, he decided to make a career change after realizing AI would be the next big thing and joined Google.

Jimmy Ba

Ba has a background in deep neural networks and is a former student of Geoffrey Hinton, who is widely referred to as the "Godfather of AI."

Ba is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. In 2023, the university awarded him a Sloan Research Fellowship, a program that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recognizes as individuals "whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders."

A LinkedIn post by the university's Department of Computer Science announcing the award said Ba's research has played a major influence in deep learning and focuses on creating efficient deep learning algorithms for neural networks.

In the X Spaces last year, Ba said his long-term research ambitions align with xAI's mission to "help humanity to overcome some of the most ambitious challenges out there" through AI tools.

Toby Pohlen

Pohlen spent over six years at Google DeepMind, where he was most recently a staff research engineer. The London-based engineer worked on evaluation tools for LLMs, as well as scalable reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind.

When xAI released Grok in November 2023, Pohlen shared a demo and suggested that the chatbot would have a regular setting as well as a "fun mode."

Ross Nordeen

Nordeen was previously a technical program manager at Tesla and worked on supercomputing before leaving to join xAI in 2023.

According to Musk's biographer, Walter Isaacson, Nordeen was called in to help Musk with a last-minute effort to move some data servers from Sacramento to Oregon.

Nordeen is said to have bought the entire stock of AirTags from an Apple Store in San Francisco, worth $2,000, so he could track the journey of the servers that were being moved.

Nordeen paid a further $2,500 at Home Depot for tools like wrenches, bolt cutters, and headlamps to help with the mission to remove and transfer the servers.

Greg Yang

Yang works on mathematics and the science of deep learning at xAI and was previously a researcher at Microsoft for more than five years.

In the X Spaces session, Yang said he took time off from his undergraduate degree at Harvard University and became a DJ and dubstep music producer. He said that after some introspection, he figured out that he didn't want to be a DJ.

He said his goal is to make artificial general intelligence happen, adding that he wants to "make something smarter than myself." He then studied mathematics to pursue his career ambition.

Guodong Zhang

Guodong has a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Toronto. He started his career in AI as a research intern at Microsoft, then Google Brain, and Google DeepMind.

He then spent about 10 months as a research scientist at Google DeepMind before he joined xAI as a pretraining lead.

Zihang Dai

Dai also joined xAI from Google, where he was mostly recently a senior research scientist and spent over five years at the company.

He holds both a master of science degree and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.