Electric vehicle trailblazer Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA, ETR:TL0) is increasing the compensation of its artificial intelligence engineering team to fend off poachers- both externally and from within Elon Musk’s cluster of technology businesses.
Writing on Twitter/X, the social media website Musk bought in 2022, Musk said “they have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases”.
‘They’ in this context refers to OpenAI, the company behind the landmark large-language model ChatGPT. Musk was one of OpenAI’s co-founders, but has since departed the group and has formed a competitor company called xAI.
OpenAI had approached Ethan Knight, a prominent machine-learning scientist at Tesla, with an offer of an undisclosed sum- though the bid was likely to be considerable.
“The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!” Musk Tweeted in response to an article in The Information detailing Knight’s attempted poaching.
Ethan is very talented, but “vision chief” would be overstating things.
There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team. Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating.
The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024
But Knight has not stayed with Tesla either- alongside numerous other high-profile Tesla engineers, he has made a lateral move within Musk’s empire to xAI.
It’s representative of a unique problem for Musk- how can he juggle talent within his ever-widening web of tech companies – Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, Twitter/X, Starlink and more – while keeping each individual ship in order?
With Tesla shares at a six-month low after penning its first sales drop in four years and concerns over Twitter’s valuation, Musk already feeling to heat.
“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” wrote Musk of Knight’s lateral move. At least he remains within the Musk empire for now.