Is Sam Altman’s OpenAI, the worldwide leader in generative artificial intelligence, attempting to poach employees from Tesla’s Autopilot team?
Elon Musk actually wants people to think that way. After it was announced on Wednesday that Tesla’s Ethan Knight became the owner of the automotive manufacturer fourth engineer To join Musk’s latest startup, xAI, the hundred billionaire claimed his worker planned to maneuver to OpenAI anyway.
“It was either xAI or her” wrote the person who poached his first AI director from Altman in 2017, adding that it was him increase their wages. “They have aggressively recruited Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and, unfortunately, in some cases have been successful.”
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI greater than eight years ago, has an ongoing feud with Altman and is actively suing his former partner over an alleged breach of contract. OpenAI didn’t reply to a request for comment Assets for comment.
Knight’s departure is a cause for concern. As growth in Tesla’s core automotive business has come to an entire standstill, investors have develop into more wary of Musk’s less traditional management methods, comparable to moving staff between his divisions as he sees fit.
Ethan could be very talented, but “Vision Chief” could be an exaggeration.
There are over 200 outstanding engineers on the Tesla AI/Autonomy team. Tesla’s progress in autonomy is accelerating.
The AI talent war is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024
Testimony within the Musk pay package case recently revealed that board members exercised little to no control and couldn’t even provide a rough estimate of what number of employees Musk faraway from Tesla to help him in his Twitter purchase. “Musk regularly uses Tesla resources to pursue projects at other companies he owns,” the court ruled, adding that nobody on the board challenged such decisions.
Concerns that Musk treats his corporations as if his own personal fortunes have only grown since he threatened the board that he would develop AI technology outside of Tesla in the event that they didn’t approve a compensation package that gave him 25% control the corporate grants.
In this context, the news that additional Tesla engineers are moving to Musk’s xAI startup caused concern amongst some small Tesla shareholders.
“Is there a precedent for the CEO of a publicly traded company poaching talent to join his private company? Is he acting in the best interests of shareholders?” a poster for the Tesla Investor Club Subreddit wondered on Wednesday. Another asked if “the board is okay with this?” while a 3rd joked: “Haha, Elon is brain-braining Tesla.”
Tesla employees needed to bridge the gap between the xAI startup and OpenAI
One of Musk’s foremost objections over the past 12 months has been the rebranding of Tesla as an AI leader because investors are willing to pay high multiples for such stocks. From this angle, investors should view Tesla less as an electrical vehicle and energy storage maker and more as a robotics company – no matter whether the corporate builds machines that walk on two metal legs like Optimus or roll on 4 wheels.
By claiming that Altman is attempting to steal from his employees, not only does he have a convenient excuse for why Knight or one other former Tesla worker finally ends up working for him at xAI, but he also increases his company’s repute at the identical time. If the industry leader behind breakthroughs like ChatGPT and Sora is eager to get its hands on Musk’s employees, then Tesla needs to be on the forefront.
Ironically, nevertheless, it was Musk who argued that investors shouldn’t draw parallels between corporations working on generative AI and people like Tesla which are solving “real AI.”
Tesla is increasing the compensation of our AI engineering team (depending on progress milestones).
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024
The technology underlying large language models is nothing in comparison with the event of self-driving cars, he claimed. Tesla employees liable for Autopilot, Full Self-Driving or its AI inference training computer Dojo work with highly complex camera data that captures objects in a three-dimensional space – versus processing easy text like a GPT-4.
In fact, it’s xAI that needs Tesla employees way over OpenAI. His latest startup that’s behind the Grok chatbot he created
Designing them from Tesla, where he employs over 200 engineers on his AI and autonomy team, is a natural step, especially since they’d already be accustomed to his leadership style and tech-focused culture.
“The AI talent war is the craziest talent war I have ever seen!” Musk wrote on Wednesday.
Especially when his corporations compete with one another.
