Tony Wu said: "It's time to start my next chapter. This is an era of possibility: a small team equipped with AI can move mountains and redefine possibilities." Previously, other co-founders such as Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy also left. Greg Yang announced last month that he would be stepping down from his role at the company to focus on fighting Lyme disease.
Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has lost another co-founder.
On February 10, Tony Wu announced his resignation from xAI in a social media post, becoming the latest core member to leave. Several co-founders had already left. Wu Yuhuai said:
It’s time to start my next chapter, an era of possibilities: a small team equipped with AI can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.
Previously, other co-founders such as Igor Babuschkin, Kyle Kosic and Christian Szegedy also left. Greg Yang announced last month that he would be stepping down from his role at the company to focus on fighting Lyme disease.
Wu Yuhuai's departure comes as xAI faces consumer boycotts and regulatory investigations. Grok AI, developed by the company, can create and distribute non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfake images at scale, based on photos of real people, including children.
Core technical experts in the field of mathematical reasoning
Wu Yuhuai is xAI’s core figure in the fields of mathematical reasoning and symbolic AI.
He graduated from the PhD program at the University of Toronto in 2021. His research areas include automated mathematical reasoning, symbolic AI and the improvement of reasoning capabilities of large language models. He then engaged in postdoctoral research at Stanford University.
During his Ph.D., Wu Yuhuai interned at Deepmind and OpenAI, and then joined the Google R&D group N2Formal, dedicated to building AI mathematicians. He has participated in multiple AI mathematics projects such as Minerva, AlphaGeometry and Autoformalization, focusing on giving artificial intelligence stronger mathematical understanding and proof capabilities.
On February 18 last year, Wu Yuhuai sat next to Musk during the live broadcast of the Grok-3 inference model, which Musk called "the smartest artificial intelligence on earth."
(Screenshot of Grok 3 live broadcast in 2025, Tony Wu, second from right)
In the benchmark test, Grok-3 achieved better results than Gemini-2 pro, GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 in mathematics, scientific logical reasoning and code writing. Analysis said that these achievements are inseparable from Wu Yuhuai's technical contributions.
Brain drain during mergers and acquisitions
Wall Street News mentioned that Musk announced that his rocket company SpaceX had acquired xAI, which may indicate that the company is about to launch a huge IPO.
The deal pushed SpaceX’s valuation to $1 trillion and xAI’s valuation to $250 billion.
Tesla CEO Musk co-founded xAI with 11 other people in 2023 to compete with competitors such as OpenAI and Google. According to the company’s website at the time, xAI’s stated goal was to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
Analysts believe that the continuous brain drain poses a challenge to xAI's technology research and development and market competitiveness, especially in the context of increasingly fierce competition in the field of artificial intelligence. The departure of core technical personnel may affect the company's product iteration and innovation capabilities.