Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric vehicle giant is giving a raise to its artificial intelligence engineers as the automaker tries to fend off poaching efforts from ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
The tech billionaire made the revelation in a series of X posts on Wednesday, confirming a report from The Information that Tesla machine learning scientist Ethan Knight has left for Musk’s AI startup, xAI.
“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” Musk wrote. “They aggressively recruited Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and were unfortunately successful in a few cases.”
Musk added that “the war for talent for AI is the craziest war for talent I’ve ever seen,” adding that Tesla is increasing compensation for its AI engineering team.
OpenAI is considered the leader in generative AI after its ChatGPT chatbot became the world’s fastest-growing software application within six months of its launch in November 2022. It sparked the launch of competing bots by Microsoft, Google and a multitude of startups. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, committing billions of dollars to the company.
The AI frenzy has made AI engineers in high demand, even as tech companies have made waves of layoffs in other fields over the past year.
Musk was among the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015, but left the board in 2018. He is suing the company and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the organization violated its founding agreement to develop AI to benefit of humanity, rather than for profit, by partnering with Microsoft.
Seeking an alternative to OpenAI and Google’s bots, Musk launched xAI last year to create what he said was “maximum truth-seeking AI.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
New York Post
