Elon Musk boosting pay of AI engineers to prevent poaching from OpenAI

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric vehicle giant is giving its artificial intelligence engineers a raise as the automaker tries to fend off poaching efforts by ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

The tech billionaire made the revelation in a series of X posts Wednesday, confirming a report from The Information that Tesla machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight left for Musk’s AI startup, xAI.

“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” Musk wrote. “They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases.”

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Musk added the “talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen,” and that Tesla is raising compensation for its AI engineering team.

OpenAI is considered the leader in generative AI after its ChatGPT chatbot became the fastest-growing software application in the world within six months of its launch in November 2022. It sparked the launch of rival bots by Microsoft, Google and a bevy of startups. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, committing billions of dollars to the company.

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The AI frenzy has put AI engineers in high demand, even as tech companies have announced waves of layoffs in other areas over the past year.

Musk was among OpenAI’s co-founders in 2015 but left the board in 2018. He is suing the company and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the organization breached its founding agreement to develop AI for the benefit of humanity, rather than for profit, by partnering with Microsoft.

Seeking an alternative to OpenAI and Google bots, Musk launched xAI last year to create what he said would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI.”

Reuters contributed to this report.