\n
![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/GettyImages-1946755108-e1712231126358.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n [ad_1]
\n<\/p>\n
Is Sam Altman\u2019s OpenAI, the world leader in generative artificial intelligence, trying to poach staff away from Tesla\u2019s Autopilot team?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Elon Musk certainly wants people to think so. After news emerged on Wednesday that Tesla\u2019s\u00a0Ethan Knight became the carmaker\u2019s\u00a0fourth engineer<\/a>\u00a0to join to Musk\u2019s latest startup, xAI, the centibillionaire claimed his employee was planning to defect to OpenAI anyway.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was either xAI or them,\u201d\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0the man who lured his\u00a0first AI director<\/a>\u00a0away from Altman in 2017, adding he was boosting<\/a> their pay. \u201cThey have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases.\u201d<\/p>\n Musk, who co-founded OpenAI more than eight years ago, maintains an\u00a0ongoing feud<\/a>\u00a0with Altman and is\u00a0actively suing<\/a>\u00a0his former partner over an alleged breach of contract. OpenAI did not respond to a request by\u00a0Fortune<\/em>\u00a0for comment.<\/p>\n Knight\u2019s departure raises concerns. As\u00a0growth<\/a>\u00a0at Tesla\u2019s core car business has ground to a\u00a0complete halt<\/a>, investors have become more wary of Musk\u2019s less traditional management methods, like moving staff between his businesses as he sees fit.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ethan is very talented, but \u201cvision chief\u201d would be overstating things. <\/p>\n There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI\/Autonomy team. Tesla\u2019s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating. <\/p>\n The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I\u2019ve ever seen!<\/p>\n \u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Testimony in Musk\u2019s\u00a0pay package case<\/a>\u00a0recently revealed board members exercise little to no oversight and couldn\u2019t give so much as a ballpark estimate of how many staff Musk\u00a0reassigned from Tesla<\/a>\u00a0to help with his Twitter<\/a> purchase. \u201cMusk regularly uses Tesla resources to address project at other companies he own,\u201d the court ruled, adding no one on the board challenged such decisions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Concerns Musk treats his companies like his own personal fiefdoms have only grown ever since he\u00a0threatened<\/a>\u00a0the board he would develop AI technology outside of Tesla if they didn\u2019t approve a compensation package granting him\u00a025% control<\/a>\u00a0over the company.<\/p>\n In this context, the news of more Tesla engineers leaving for Musk\u2019s xAI startup caused alarm among some of Tesla\u2019s small shareholders.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIs there a precedent for the CEO of a public company poaching talent to go over to his private company? Is he acting in shareholders\u2019 best interests?\u201d one poster on the Tesla investors club\u00a0subreddit<\/a>\u00a0wondered on Wednesday. Another asked if \u201cthe board of directors are cool with this?\u201d while a third joked \u201chaha, Elon is brain draining Tesla.\u201d<\/p>\n One of Musk\u2019s primary objections over the past 12 months has been to rebrand Tesla as an AI leader now that investors are willing to pay high multiples for such stocks. In this view, investors should think of Tesla less as a manufacturer of EVs and energy storage and more as a robotics company\u2014whether it builds machines walking on two metal legs like\u00a0Optimus<\/a>\u00a0or rolling on four wheels.<\/p>\n By alleging that Altman is trying to steal his workers, not only does he have a convenient excuse for why Knight or any other ex-Tesla employee ends up working for him at xAI, he also elevates his company\u2019s reputation simultaneously. If the industry leader behind\u00a0breakthroughs<\/a>\u00a0like ChatGPT and\u00a0Sora<\/a>\u00a0is desperate to get its hands on Musk\u2019s workers, then Tesla must be at the cutting edge.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ironically, however, it was Musk who argued investors should not draw parallels between companies working on generative AI and those like Tesla solving \u201creal-world AI\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Tesla is increasing comp (contingent on progress milestones) of our AI engineering team<\/p>\n \u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The technology powering large language models is nothing compared to developing cars that drive on their own, he assertd. Tesla employees assigned to Autopilot, Full Self-Driving or his\u00a0AI inference<\/a>\u00a0training computer\u00a0Dojo<\/a>\u00a0work with highly complex camera data capturing objects in a three-dimensional space\u2014as opposed to processing simple text like a GPT-4.<\/p>\n In fact it is xAI that needs Tesla employees far more than OpenAI. His new startup, which is behind the\u00a0Grok chatbot<\/a>\u00a0he sells to his premium social media customers on X, is too far behind Altman\u2019s company to present any legitimate threat, so he needs every brain he can get to help him narrow the competitive gap.\u00a0<\/p>\n Drafting them from Tesla, where he employs over 200 engineers in his AI and autonomy team, is a natural move, especially since they would already be familiar with his management style and engineering-driven culture.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I\u2019ve ever seen!\u201d Musk wrote on Wednesday.<\/p>\n Especially when his companies are competing amongst each other.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
Tesla staff needed to narrow xAI startup\u2019s gap to OpenAI<\/h2>\n
\n
Subscribe to the Eye on AI newsletter to stay abreast of how AI is shaping the future of business. Sign up<\/a> for free.<\/div>\n