Tax filings by the Elon Musk-founded research lab OpenAI revealed that its best researchers are paid top dollar for their expertise. In 2016 alone, OpenAI paid Ilya Sutskever, its top researcher, an impressive salary of $1.9 million.
In a statement to the New York Times, Sutskever noted that other AI companies actually offered him more substantial salaries. The top researcher noted, however, that OpenAI has a certain appeal, in the way that it shares its work openly with the outside world in an effort to push for a safe AI revolution.
“I turned down offers for multiple times the dollar amount I accepted at OpenAI. Others did the same. (I expect) salaries at OpenAI to increase as the organization pursues its mission of ensuring powerful A.I. benefits all of humanity,” Ilya said.
OpenAI published its launch blog post in December 2015, with the nonprofit being co-founded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman. In its first year of operations, the nonprofit spent about $11 million, with $7 million going into the salaries and employee benefits of its researchers and staff. The company employed 52 people then.
World’s best DOTA players get beat by OpenAI bot [Source: OpenAI]
Sutskever’s $1.9 million compensation might be eye-catching, but pay for OpenAI’s other lead researchers in 2016 was nothing to scoff at either. Ian Goodfellow, whom OpenAI hired in March 2016, was paid more than $800,000 for his work during the year. Famed roboticist and University of California, Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel was hired in June 2016 and was paid $425,000. These amounts, including Sutskever’s nearly $2 million pay, included signing bonuses.
Remarkably, OpenAI’s top researchers might actually be underselling their income potential. Being a nonprofit, the Elon Musk-founded company cannot offer stock options to its employees — something that bigger AI companies include in their compensation plan.
Over the past couple of years, salaries for top AI researchers have seen a meteoric rise due to the industry’s ever-growing demand. Chris Nicholson, CEO and founder of Skymind, an AI company, stated that there are simply far too few individuals with skills in artificial intelligence available. While he sees the number of AI researchers growing, he does not think demand will be met anytime soon.
“There is a mountain of demand and a trickle of supply. If anything, demand for that talent is growing faster than the supply of new researchers, because AI is moving from early adopters to wider use,” he said.
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Some of OpenAI’s best-paid talent in 2016 have since moved on to different ventures. Goodfellow ultimately went back to Google, while Abbeel left the nonprofit with two other researchers to form their own robotics startup called Embodied Intelligence. Another OpenAI alumnus, Andrej Karpathy, left the company to head the AI division of Tesla.
Earlier this year, OpenAI announced that Elon Musk would be stepping down from its board of directors to avoid any conflict of interest with his work at Tesla. Back in January, however, a rare announcement from OpenAI’s official Twitter account suggested that the nonprofit is looking to hire more employees.
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Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
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Elon Musk escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”
The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”
Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love
Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.
Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.
The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”
The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.
Custom wraps via mobile app https://t.co/5OydZ26g9p pic.twitter.com/uexU0ZePxu
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
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It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.
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