xAI

Igor Babuschkin’s last day at the company was today, he announced on X, writing that he wants to “continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity.” He said he would start a firm called Babuschkin Ventures, which will focus on “AI safety research and backs startups in AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.”

As Elon’s Grok chatbot keeps adding sexy bots for us talk to, one commenter predicts a productive beat for a future Verge staffer.

Elon Musk announced that the chatbot’s controversial image-to-video feature has expanded to Android following its iOS launch, and is now free to all US users “for the next few days.” Musk hasn’t yet responded to concerns around its ability to make nude celebrity deepfakes, but now Grok users won’t need to pay a subscription fee to do so.

xAI has released its latest chatbot companion, “Valentine” — the emo-flavored anime boyfriend that Elon Musk modeled after broody fictional heartthrobs like Edward Cullen and Christian Grey. Like the busty blonde “Ani” companion, you’ll need a $30-per-month SuperGrok subscription to access Valentine, but please note that touching grass is free.

In April, xAI asked workers to record their facial expressions as part of efforts to train Grok to understand human emotions, according to a report from Business Insider. During the process, xAI reportedly had employees sign a form that gives the company access to their “likeness” for training and “inclusion in and promotion of commercial products and services.”

Want to help xAI create more AI avatars after my colleague Victoria Song said Grok’s anime companion made her want to “bleach my soul and get myself to a nunnery”? You can now apply to be a fullstack engineer or a mobile Android engineer where that’s your full-time job. The salary range is $180,000 - $440,000.

Jewish Insider reports that a group of mainly Democratic lawmakers are asking xAI about some of the worst messages from Grok’s Nazi meltdown, demanding to know how it happened. As interesting as the answer might be — beyond the changes we already know about — ad-hoc investigation of legal (at least in the US) chatbot speech is probably not a road we want to go down without caution. But the sheer absurd awfulness of the quotes is a pretty striking failure for anybody working on Grok, too.

Elon Musk’s AI company has been granted a permit for 15 natural gas turbines to power a Memphis data center, along with limits on their emissions, which include smog-forming nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide.

Kyle Chayka, who wrote for this website about the “airspace” aesthetic created by social media, is now looking into how LLM models affect creativity. He suggests that if Silicon Valley once homogenized decor — and, to some degree, created beige influencers — it may now be making LLM users less original, too.