Tesla Raises AI Engineer Pay in 'Talent War' --- CEO Musk is trying to repel poaching efforts from OpenAI, other competitors

"Tesla is raising compensation for its artificial intelligence engineers in a bid to ward off poaching from the likes of OpenAI, Chief Executive Elon Musk said.

Musk said his electric-vehicle company is boosting pay at a time when OpenAI has been "aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers," in a series of posts on social-media platform X late Wednesday.

The competition for AI engineers "is the craziest talent war I've ever seen," he said.

Musk was responding to a report from news outlet The Information that Tesla machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight had left the automaker to join Musk's AI startup, xAI.

"Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them," Musk said.

OpenAI didn't respond to requests for comment.

The recent boom in AI has intensified Silicon Valley's talent wars, as startups compete with established tech giants in the race to build the next big thing.

Tech companies are serving up million-dollar-a-year compensation packages, accelerated stock-vesting schedules and offers to poach entire engineering teams to draw people with expertise and experience in the kind of generative AI that is powering OpenAI's ChatGPT and other humanlike bots.

Layoffs are continuing in other areas of tech, as companies reallocate resources to invest more in covering the enormous cost of developing AI technology.

Musk's comments also come amid tensions with OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman.

In February, Musk declared war on his former protege, filing a lawsuit over OpenAI's pursuit of profit.

In the suit, Musk, who helped found the ChatGPT maker in 2015, claimed OpenAI's close relationship with Microsoft goes against the company's original commitment to public, open-source AI, claims that OpenAI denies.

OpenAI has been leading the AI boom, while xAI has been left playing catch-up with the organization Musk's money helped get off the ground.

Tesla's AI efforts have so far focused on driverless cars and humanoid robots.

In 2022, Musk showed off a prototype of a humanoid robot at a Tesla event, part of his efforts to shape the public perception of the company as more than just an electric-vehicle maker.

The Tesla chief also revealed last summer the car company plans to spend more than $1 billion through the end of 2024 on a supercomputer, dubbed Dojo, that is to help develop driverless-car technology." [1]

1. Tesla Raises AI Engineer Pay in 'Talent War' --- CEO Musk is trying to repel poaching efforts from OpenAI, other competitors. Vipers, Gareth; Kao, Kimberley.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Apr 2024: B.4.