Elon Musk raises pay for Tesla artificial intelligence engineers to combat OpenAI headhunting

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, announced that his company is increasing the salaries of its artificial intelligence (AI) engineers, following attempts by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, to recruit his staff.

“Tesla is increasing compensation (contingent on progress milestones) of our AI engineering team,” Musk reported via X, revealing that this decision was made due to the efforts that OpenAI is allegedly making to attract artificial intelligence engineers from his electric vehicle company.

“They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases,” he acknowledged.

The tycoon made this announcement after a report from The Information suggested that Musk was taking Tesla engineers to his artificial intelligence startup xAI, which caused concern among the vehicle company’s investors.

The report mentioned Ethan Knight, a machine learning scientist at Tesla, as an example of an engineer at the electric car company who joined xAI.

However, Musk revealed in his post that that decision was made because Ethan was thinking about joining OpenAI, so the only options were to bring him to his startup or allow OpenAI to take him.

“The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!” he commented.

The tense relationship between Musk and the CEO of OpenAI

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the board in 2018, is currently in a legal battle against the company and its CEO, Sam Altman. The Tesla CEO alleges that OpenAI violated the founding agreement by partnering with Microsoft, considering that this action contradicts the initial purpose of developing AI for the benefit of humanity rather than for profit.

To find an alternative to OpenAI and the robots developed by Google, Musk launched xAI last year to create what he describes as “maximum truth-seeking AI.”