Tesla CEO Elon Musk is giving the electric car giant a raise to its artificial intelligence engineers as the automaker seeks to avoid poaching by ChatGPT developer OpenAI. said.
The tech billionaire made the revelation Wednesday in a series of X posts, confirming a report in The Information that Tesla's 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 have aggressively recruited Tesla engineers by offering huge rewards, and unfortunately in some cases they have been successful.”
“This talent war around AI is the craziest talent war I've ever seen,” Musk said, adding that Tesla is increasing pay for its AI engineering teams.
OpenAI is considered a 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. This led to the launch of competing bots by Microsoft, Google, and a series of startups. Microsoft is a big investor in OpenAI, plowing billions of dollars into the company.
The AI ​​craze has increased demand for AI engineers, even as technology companies have cut jobs in other areas over the past year.
Musk was one of OpenAI's co-founders in 2015, but retired from the company's board in 2018. He is suing the company and CEO Sam Altman, accusing OpenAI of violating its founding agreement to develop AI for the benefit of humanity, not profit. Microsoft.
Seeking an alternative to OpenAI and Google bots, Musk launched xAI last year to create what he calls the “maximum truth-seeking AI.”
Reuters contributed to this report.