Home Elon Musk to raise Tesla AI staff salaries to curb OpenAI poaching

Elon Musk to raise Tesla AI staff salaries to curb OpenAI poaching

TL:DR

  • Tesla CEO Elon Musk announces increased compensation for AI engineering team.
  • Responds to reports of Tesla engineers being recruited by OpenAI with lucrative offers.
  • Highlights escalating AI talent war; tensions between Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman.

In an escalation of the artificial intelligence (AI) talent war, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X that OpenAI has been “aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers” and as a result, Tesla will be increasing the compensation it gives its AI engineering team.

The 52-year-old billionaire seemed to confirm that it is an issue focused on compensation rather than staff being dissatisfied with the company’s work environment, in a further post on the social network he owns. A user asked “Is Tesla matching these compensation offers? Or is it more than [sic] these employees just want to switch things up, so matching wouldn’t matter?” and Musk responded that “Tesla is increasing comp (contingent on progress milestones) of our AI engineering team.”

This came after a story reported by The Information that a prominent machine learning expert from Tesla was moving to join xAI, Musk’s AI company. Musk responded to the story that the engineer had been planning to leave for OpenAI as a result of the talent poaching.

 

Elon Musk vs OpenAI: The AI talent war

“The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!” said Musk in another Twitter post. And he’s not wrong about that – many big tech companies are falling over themselves to expand their AI capabilities while the bubble is still growing. Earlier this year Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta wants to begin to create an artificial general intelligence and acknowledged the fierce competition between companies for top talent.

In a report from 2023, it was revealed that OpenAI provides the highest salaries for new PhD graduates at $865k. Tesla comes in at fourth on the list with a still eye-watering $780k.

Tensions between Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been high for some time. Earlier this year Musk announced his intentions to sue OpenAI and Altman for violation of commitments made when they established the company together. OpenAI countered him in court with claims that some of his allegations were “incoherent”. They also expressed concerns that the discovery phase of the lawsuit could be exploited by Musk to access proprietary information and urged caution.

Musk then decided to open-source xAI’s chatbot Grok in response to decisions made by OpenAI that he disagreed with.

Featured image credit: generated by MidJourney

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Ali Rees
Tech journalist

Ali Rees is a freelance writer based in the UK. They have worked as a data and analytics consultant, a software tester, and a digital marketing and SEO specialist. They have been a keen gamer and tech enthusiast since their childhood in are currently the Gaming and Tech editor at Brig Newspaper. They also have a Substack where they review short video games. During the pandemic, Ali turned their hand to live streaming and is a fan of Twitch. When not writing, Ali enjoys playing video and board games, live music, and reading. They have two cats and both of…

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