OpenAI snaps up top talent from Tesla, xAI, and Meta
According to an internal Slack message sent by OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on Tuesday, the new hires include Lau, who was vice president of software engineering at Tesla, Uday Ruddarraju, former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and X, Mike Dalton, an infrastructure engineer also from xAI, and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta.
WIRED reported that both Dalton and Ruddarraju previously worked at Robinhood and collaborated on Colossus, a supercomputer built with over 200,000 GPUs.
"We're excited to welcome these new members to our scaling team," said OpenAI spokesperson Hannah Wong. "Our approach is to continue building and bringing together world-class infrastructure, research, and product teams to accelerate our mission and deliver the benefits of AI to hundreds of millions of people," WIRED quoted her as saying.
The scaling team manages backend hardware, software systems, and data centers, including Stargate--a new joint venture to build AI infrastructure--which enables training of foundation models. WIRED noted that while the work may be less visible than ChatGPT, it is vital to OpenAI's goal of achieving artificial general intelligence and staying ahead of competitors.
"Infrastructure is where research meets reality, and OpenAI has already demonstrated this successfully," Ruddarraju said in a statement to WIRED. "Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshot that perfectly matches the ambitious, systems-level challenges I love taking on."
"It has become incredibly clear to me that accelerating progress towards safe, well-aligned artificial general intelligence is the most rewarding mission I could imagine for the next chapter of my career," Lau said in a separate statement to WIRED.
The report added that these hires come amid intensifying competition in the AI industry. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has attracted at least seven employees from OpenAI by offering unusually high compensation and vast compute access. WIRED reported that this hiring spree prompted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to inform staff that compensation models may need to be recalibrated.
According to WIRED, Zuckerberg has also targeted talent at Thinking Machines Lab, a startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and cofounder John Schulman.
The publication further reported that these new hires from Tesla, xAI, and Meta could heighten tensions between Altman and Elon Musk, who cofounded OpenAI in 2015 and left in 2018 over leadership disagreements. Musk is suing OpenAI for allegedly abandoning its nonprofit mission, while OpenAI is countersuing for unfair competition and interference with its business.
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