Elon Musk Says OpenAI Has Been Poaching Tesla Engineers Aggressively

• Elon Musk says he’s raising salaries for people working on Tesla’s AI engineering team.
• The pay increase, Musk said, is because OpenAI has “aggressively recruited Tesla engineers.”
• “The war for talent for AI is the craziest war for talent I’ve ever seen!” » Musk said.

AI engineers working at Tesla may have Sam Altman and OpenAI to thank for their pay raises.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that his company is increasing pay for people working on the AI ​​engineering team. The pay increase, Musk said, was a response to OpenAI’s attempts to poach Tesla engineers.

“They have aggressively recruited Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases,” Musk said of OpenAI’s recruiting efforts in an X article on Wednesday.

Musk made the remarks in response to an article from The Information published the same day. According to the report, Ethan Knight, a machine learning scientist at Tesla, will join Musk’s AI company, xAI.

“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” Musk wrote on X.

Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside of normal business hours.

Competition for AI talent is intensifying as technology companies race to become dominant players in the field. In addition to offering exorbitant salaries, some Big Tech executives have adopted a personal touch when it comes to wooing engineers.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg allegedly wrote personal emails to AI researchers at Google’s DeepMind, according to The Information. In fact, Zuckerberg’s Meta even offered jobs to candidates without conducting an interview, the outlet reported.

It’s not just Zuckerberg who has had to take personal steps. Google co-founder Sergey Brin had to personally call an employee who was considering leaving Google for OpenAI. According to The Information’s report, Brin made several promises to convince the employee to stay, including an offer of higher salary.

“The war for talent for AI is the craziest war for talent I’ve ever seen!” Musk said Wednesday.