Elon Musk is throwing fresh new accusations against OpenAI amid their ongoing legal and, seems to be, personal dispute. This time with the AI startup "poaching" Tesla staff with bigger paydays.
The statement came as the Tesla CEO announced that he would increase the EV automakers' basic wages, particularly to its AI engineering team, after OpenAI was caught "aggressively recruiting" their engineers.
Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024
They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases.
Musk did not provide further proof that OpenAI is indeed poaching Tesla's employees aside from a claim that one of its chief engineers supposedly left the company for OpenAI.
The chief engineer in question, Tesla's computer vision chief Ethan Knight, moved to xAI, another company owned by Musk, instead.
Musk is currently embroiled in a legal battle against the AI startup he helped start over supposed contract violations in its founding principles.
In response, OpenAI has dismissed Musk's lawsuit of being "incoherent" and "frivolous."
Elon Musk Continues Beef with OpenAI Amid AI Push in Tesla
Accusations of poaching are only the latest set of allegations Musk has thrown against OpenAI in his ongoing beef with the company.
For exactly what reasons? Insider reports earlier indicate that Musk previously offered to acquire OpenAI to power Tesla's Dojo supercomputer but was promptly rebuked.
Since then, Musk has been pushing his AI startup, xAI, to expand its applications outside of X (formerly Twitter) into Tesla and his other companies.
For now, the billionaire is seeking to expand the company's AI hardware by securing advanced chips from AMD and NVIDIA.
Related Article : Elon Musk Plans to Buy AMD Chips for Tesla's AI Hardware
'Talent War' on AI Wages as Demands Surge
Although Musk has yet to provide definite proof of corporate poaching of AI engineers, other companies have been reported of doing the same thing amid a surge in demands for the technology.
The Information earlier reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sending personal emails to leaving Google employees to join his company instead.
Google DeepMind itself has also been reportedly securing employees to not leave for OpenAI as the company pushes for more products to compete in an increasingly steeper market.
Both OpenAI and Meta have yet to respond to The Information's reports.
