Igor Babuschkin

Igor Babuschkin is the co-founder and CEO of River AI, a startup building an open AI stack for personalized, user-owned AI models. He previously co-founded xAI with Elon Musk, where he led work on infrastructure, training, multimodal systems, and product, and is credited with naming Grok. Earlier in his career, he was a senior research engineer at Google DeepMind, contributing to WaveNet and AlphaStar, and worked at OpenAI on reasoning and pretraining. He began his career as a physicist at CERN on the LHCb experiment and holds a master's degree in physics from TU Dortmund.