Elon Musk has acknowledged that Tesla has to make special efforts to retain artificial intelligence experts, some of whom have been hired over the past year to join his AI venture. He quit his job at an automobile manufacturer.
Tesla will increase compensation for its AI engineering team based on performance milestones, Musk wrote on his social media network X. In response to a report from information The CEO criticized how his startup xAI poached four engineers from Tesla, calling it “the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!”
The exodus of talent from Mr. Musk’s most valuable company to his newest could exacerbate concerns about conflict and governance within the billionaire’s empire. Musk said in January that he would rather develop AI and robotics products elsewhere unless he was given about 25% voting control at Tesla. Two weeks later, a Delaware judge voided a huge stock award made to him by Tesla’s board in 2018.
Musk announced the creation of xAI last July, after months of hinting that he wanted to develop a replacement for his hit ChatGPT product. He played a central role in co-founding his chatbot developer OpenAI, but clashed with other leaders of the startup.
“As Tesla continues to increase its focus on AI, this will eliminate potential future conflicts with Mr. Elon,” OpenAI said in a February 2018 blog post announcing his departure from the board. said.
rear information Musk reported Wednesday that Ethan Knight, a Tesla team member who works on computer vision for advanced driving systems, left last month to join xAI, and Musk said OpenAI was looking to hire him.
“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” Musk wrote to X. “They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers by offering huge rewards, and unfortunately in some cases they have been successful.”
A few months after Tesla lost senior director of AI Andrei Karpathy in July 2022, he returned to OpenAI to work on large-scale language models for ChatGPT. Mr. Karpathy left the company earlier this year.
Musk launched a ChatGPT competitor called Grok in November. He said investors in Company X (which has lost significant value since acquiring the company formerly known as Twitter) will own 25% of xAI.
“Tesla has over 200 talented engineers on its AI/autonomy team,” Musk wrote in a post Wednesday, downplaying Knight’s departure to xAI, adding, “Tesla’s pace of progress on autonomy is… It’s accelerating,” he wrote.
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