Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that his company has to make efforts to retain its artificial intelligence engineers as the talent hunt in the AI field heats up.
Elon Musk said on April 4 that his electric vehicle (EV) company is increasing compensation for the AI engineering team in response to OpenAI’s poaching efforts of Tesla engineers.
After The Information reported on April 3 that Tesla machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight is leaving for Mr. Musk’s AI startup, xAI, the tech billionaire posted on X, saying Mr. Knight will join OpenAI.
“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” Mr. Musk wrote. “They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases.”
In another post, Mr. Musk downplayed Knight’s departure, assuring that many talents at his EV company are making progress, saying, “There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team. Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating.”
Challenge to OpenAI
Mr. Musk was an OpenAI co-founder in 2015, but departed the company in 2018 over its for-profit shift. In July last year, he announced the launch of xAI to compete with ChatGPT, a product of OpenAI.
The first product of his xAI, Grok, was launched in November. Grok is available to X premium members.
“Contrary to the Founding Agreement, Defendants have chosen to use GPT-4 not for the benefit of humanity, but as proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world,” Mr. Musk wrote in the complaint, referring to Microsoft.
OpenAI received billions of dollars from Microsoft since the company switched to a for-profit model in 2018. Microsoft has invested around $13 billion in the company.
AI Threat Warning
In March 2023, Mr. Musk joined dozens of AI experts and industry executives in signing an open letter calling on all AI labs to “immediately pause” training of systems more powerful than Chat GPT-4 for at least six months.The letter, issued by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, has been signed by more than 1,100 individuals, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque, and engineers from Meta and Google, among others.
They argue that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose “profound risks to society and humanity” and change the “history of life on Earth,” citing extensive research on the issue and acknowledgments by “top AI labs.”
“Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an ‘AI summer’ in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt,” the experts said.
“Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do so here. Let’s enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall,” they argued.
They called for AI labs and independent experts to use the six-month moratorium to develop and implement a set of safety protocols for advanced AI design that would ensure that these systems are “safe beyond a reasonable doubt.”
