xAI co-founder departs Elon Musk’s AI company

Tony Wu has exited from Elon Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) firm, xAI.

Wu shared in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday that he has stepped down from his role.

"I'm ready to begin a new phase," Wu wrote. "A period brimming with opportunities: a small team with AIs can achieve monumental goals and reshape the future."

"And to Elon @elonmusk - I am grateful for your faith in the mission and for the incredible journey," he continued.

Within the last year, Wu becomes the fourth cofounder to leave. Christian Szegedy resigned in February, as per his LinkedIn. 

Igor Babuschkin made his exit public in August, and Greg Yang noted last month that he had taken time away from the company for health reasons.

Prior to his time at the company, Wu was at Google for almost two years and also did an internship at OpenAI, according to his LinkedIn profile.

xAI made its debut in 2023. Musk has mentioned that the company and its Grok chatbot aim to be an alternative to what he refers to as "woke" chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

In recent developments, Musk has integrated the company with his social media platform X. Just last week, Musk's aerospace company, SpaceX, acquired xAI.

The company is said to be preparing for a public offering later this year that could value SpaceX at $1.5 trillion.

Recently, xAI has faced scrutiny after its chatbot, Grok, was accused of creating inappropriate sexual images of real individuals. 

The backlash led to limitations on Grok's image-creating capabilities on X.