Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently provided some insights behind the move of a Tesla engineer to xAI, his artificial intelligence startup. As per Musk, the move was a way to retain the employee since he was being poached by OpenAI, which has reportedly been attempting to recruit Tesla engineers with attractive compensation plans.
Musk’s comments came amidst news that Tesla Staff Machine Learning Scientist Ethan Knight, who was a member of the Autopilot Vision Team, had joined xAI. A report about the matter, published by The Information, adopted the angle of Musk snaring promising engineers from Tesla and moving them to his artificial intelligence startup.
Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024
They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases.
As per Musk in a post on X, however, this was not necessarily the case. The Tesla CEO noted that Knight was about to join OpenAI, so it was a matter of the Tesla engineer either working for the GPT-4 maker or xAI. Musk then mentioned that OpenAI has actually been recruiting Tesla engineers, and they have been quite successful.
“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them. They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases,” Musk wrote. Musk also stated in a later post that the war for talented individuals in the artificial intelligence sphere has been extremely fierce. “The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!” Musk noted.
Tesla is increasing comp (contingent on progress milestones) of our AI engineering team
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024
When asked if Tesla was matching the compensation offers from companies like OpenAI, the CEO noted that the electric vehicle maker is indeed increasing its compensation for its AI engineering team. This, if any, should help Tesla retain its existing talent in its AI team. The company, after all, is attempting to reach extremely ambitious goals in its AI program, such as the rollout of autonomous driving solutions and the development of systems that will be used for humanoid robots.
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