Musk Says Tesla Is Boosting Engineer Pay in AI Talent War

By Kimberley Kao

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

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

The competition for AI "is the craziest talent war I've ever seen," Musk tweeted.

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

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

Musk had backed OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in its early days, but has since had a falling out with the company. He has been developing AI at Tesla, as well as integrating xAI's chatbot, Grok, into his X platform.

Write to Kimberley Kao at kimberley.kao@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 04, 2024 01:09 ET (05:09 GMT)

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