Latest news with #DavidLau
Forbes
12-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Meta And OpenAI's Talent Wars: How AI Mints Elites But Displaces Others
The Meta AI logo is displayed on a mobile phone with the Meta logo visible on a tablet in this photo ... More illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on January 26, 2025. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The AI talent war has escalated into a white-hot race. After Meta's poaching spree, OpenAI hired Tesla's former VP of software engineering David Lau and xAI's infrastructure architects Uday Ruddarraju and Mike Dalton, who built xAI's 200,000-GPU Colossus supercomputer. With Meta deploying recruits to its Superintelligence Lab and hiring Apple's Foundation Models lead Ruoming Pang with over $200 million package, elite talent and computing power have become existential currencies. This fierce competition means a dichotomy of AI's impact on the workforce. While companies dangle nine-figure salaries for top AI talents, mass layoffs may continue across the tech industry. Impacted roles not only include human resources and customer service, but increasingly software development and middle-level management positions. Talent Wars: History Reverberates This AI hiring frenzy mirrors Microsoft and Google's intense 'war for talent' in the 2000s, triggered by Google's disruptive rise. Google's focus on the internet's transformative potential lured some of the brightest engineers, forcing Microsoft to overhaul hiring and retention strategies. In 2005, when Microsoft sued Google after executive Kai-Fu Lee departed Microsoft to join Google, symbolizing the battle for technical visionaries and Google's aggressive recruitment tactics. Beyond talent, Microsoft and Google clashed directly in web technologies. While Microsoft dominated browsers with Internet Explorer, Google's superior page rank algorithm made it the search leader. Crucially, Microsoft's early search project Keywords was shut down over revenue-cannibalization fears, ceding the ad-search market to Google. This reflected a broader contrast, Google's simplicity and teamwork efficiency in its user interface such as Google Docs and appealed to evolving users, while Microsoft's complex legacy interfaces struggled against the web's disruptive momentum. But today, Google Chrome and Google search face unprecedented challenges from OpenAI as the latter announced the release of its own browser soon. The Scarcity of Top AI Talent Competition centers on specialized AI researchers from elite PhD programs with machine learning backgrounds and veterans who already spearheaded key innovations in top companies. Meta's recruitment of Scale AI founder Alexandre Wang and a dozen of OpenAI and Deepmind veterans crystalizes the trend, signaling heavy investment in future AI directions: advanced reasoning (hiring OpenAI's Hongyu Ren), multimodal systems (hiring OpenAI's Huiwen Chang and DeepMind's Jack Rae), LLM infrastructure, and AI agents (hiring OpenAI's Trapit Bansal). Perhaps no more than a few hundreds of AI top talents worldwide possess this caliber of expertise, a scarcity inflating salaries to star levels while reducing the job prospect of software engineers whose programming skills can be automated. Alumni from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepMind, including Ilya Sutskever (founder of Safe Superintelligence), Mira Murati and Lilian Weng (founders of Thinking Machines Lab), fuel new ventures, but cash-rich giants destabilize them through financial overpowering. Paradoxically, this talent churn risks homogenizing core AI technologies as ideas circulate within a tightly knit talent web. Sustainable breakthroughs now depend on defining new problem frontiers, and developing new AI applications with built in domain expertise ranging from medicine, science, finance, law, coding, marketing and sales, and not refining existing models. For instance, the biomedicine AI start-up Arc Institute is designing a machine learning model trained on DNA of 100,000 species to identify disease-causing genome mutations and to assist new drug discovery. The Layoff Paradox While tech giants court AI stars, the industry has cut more than 150,000 jobs since 2023. Microsoft's 9,100 engineer-targeted cuts and Intel's planned 20% reduction contrast with the industry's $40billion+ in AI investments this year. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledges, AI now automates coding, analysis, and strategy, erasing roles these companies once prized. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Job Report projects 92 million job displacements versus 170 million new roles, demanding the workforce's urgent adaptation to automated technologies. Growth sectors will prioritize physical labor (construction), emotional intelligence (elderly care), robotics (physical intelligence), and sustainability, fields where AI complements rather than replaces humans. Notably, technological literacy and creative resilience will outpace coding skills in value by 2030. Universities must prepare students by updating the computer science curricula to focus on deep learning, reinforcement learning, multimodal AI and AI infrastructure design, among other skills in demand on the tech job market. We face extraordinary challenges of a bifurcated future, echoing early internet talent wars with exponentially higher stakes. As elite researchers command overflowing compensation, mid-career technologists confront obsolescence. Companies racing toward AGI must answer a moral question: Can we reskill populations at AI's disruptive pace, or will displacement ignite social upheaval? The answer will define our century more profoundly than any model.
Times of Oman
10-07-2025
- Business
- Times of Oman
OpenAI snaps up top talent from Tesla, xAI, and Meta
San Francisco: OpenAI has hired four high-profile engineers from rival tech companies, including former Tesla executive David Lau, to join its scaling team, WIRED reported. 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.
The Hindu
09-07-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
OpenAI poaches top AI talent from xAI, Meta and Tesla: Report
OpenAI has reportedly poached four prominent AI engineers and researchers from their rivals, per a report by Wired. David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, Uday Ruddarraju, former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and X, Mike Dalton, another infrastructure engineer from xAI and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta, all have joined OpenAI. Co-founder and president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, confirmed the news on X and welcomed the four new hires. The report said that the researchers will be joining OpenAI's scaling team which handles the backend hardware and software systems and data centres including Stargate. Per the report, Ruddarraju and Dalton were both working on building xAI's Colossus, believed to be the world's largest supercomputer comprising more than 200,000 GPUs. In a post on X Ruddarraju bid farewell to X saying, 'When I first joined, I thought everyone was absolutely nuts for thinking we could deploy 100K GPUs in 4 months, especially without a fully functioning site. Watching us go and double that, and most importantly successfully train Grok 3 made me incredibly proud... and very happy to be wrong.' Talent poaching in AI is becoming increasingly aggressive after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poached from competitors including OpenAI for his new Superintelligence team. A total of seven high profile AI researchers from OpenAI have now joined Meta's AGI team. Last week, Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI reportedly sent out an internal memo promising to recalibrate. Chen described Meta's actions saying he felt like 'someone has broken into our home and stolen something.'
WIRED
08-07-2025
- Business
- WIRED
OpenAI Poaches 4 High-Ranking Engineers From Tesla, xAI, and Meta
OpenAI has hired four high-profile engineers away from rivals, including David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, to join the company's scaling team, WIRED has learned. The news came via an internal Slack message sent by OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on Tuesday. Lau is joined by Uday Ruddarraju, the former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and X, Mike Dalton, an infrastructure engineer from xAI, and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta. Both Dalton and Ruddarraju also previously worked at Robinhood. At xAI, Ruddarraju worked on building Colossus, a massive supercomputer comprising more than 200,000 GPUs. OpenAI's scaling team manages the backend hardware and software systems and data centers, including Stargate—a new joint venture dedicated to building AI infrastructure—that allow its researchers to train cutting-edge foundation models. The work, though less buzzy than external-facing products like ChatGPT, is critical to OpenAI's mission of achieving artificial general intelligence—and staying ahead of its rivals. '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.
Business Wire
23-04-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
DPL to Provide Insurance Solutions for Indivisible Partners
LOUISVILLE, Ky.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DPL Financial Partners, the leading platform for commission-free annuities, today announced that it was selected by Indivisible Partners to provide insurance solutions for advisor teams and their clients on the privately-owned independent advisory firm's wealth platform. "We look forward to helping Indivisible advisors build meaningful relationships with clients and grow their businesses, all while maintaining the highest standards of quality in the solutions and services they provide." 'We want to equip advisors to do more for their clients than they could anywhere else,' said Indivisible Partners Executive Chairman John Thiel. 'That means leveraging innovative solutions to create a comprehensive wealth management experience that helps clients make better decisions. As the recognized leader in fee-based annuity and insurance solutions for RIAs, DPL's platform fits perfectly within our curated offering.' Through DPL, Indivisible advisors will have access to a marketplace of more than 75 commission-free annuities and a wide range of insurance products from leading carriers. In addition, DPL's tools and technology will facilitate the discovery, fulfillment and management of insurance products as part of advisors' comprehensive wealth management workflow. They also will have access to DPL's Breakaway Accelerator Program, a turnkey solution for advisors joining Indivisible to transition clients' commissioned annuities to a fee-based advisory model. "Considering the pedigree of its founders and their uncompromising commitment to creating the optimal environment for advisor and client success, we're gratified Indivisible Partners chose DPL to help deliver on that promise,' said DPL Founder and CEO David Lau. 'They recognize the power of DPL's innovative products and technology to enhance their advisors' ability to deliver the best outcome for each client. We look forward to helping Indivisible advisors build meaningful relationships with clients and grow their businesses, all while maintaining the highest standards of quality in the solutions and services they provide." About DPL Financial Partners DPL Financial Partners is the leading commission-free annuity marketplace bringing best-in-class solutions from the nation's top carriers to registered investment advisors (RIAs), their clients, and consumers. DPL's products, proprietary tools and embedded technology enable RIAs to incorporate insurance and annuities into their practices to more holistically serve their clients. Clients benefit from products that offer competitive pricing and transparent, fiduciary implementation to meet a range of needs in the financial plan. About Indivisible Partners Indivisible Partners is a privately held, independent wealth advisory firm dedicated to empowering advisors to help clients achieve their desired financial outcomes through a focus on quality decision-making. The firm provides a client-first model that enables select advisors to deliver high-touch, comprehensive wealth advisory services to high-net-worth individuals and families, business founders and institutional clients. Through its expansive suite of client solutions, innovative platform and access to leading insights and support, Indivisible Partners offers a distinctive choice for entrepreneurial advisors looking to elevate their practice. Indivisible Partners is founded by a team of industry veterans with a proven track record of helping advisors grow and transform their practices. Indivisible Partners is headquartered in Clearwater, FL, and operates as a federally registered investment advisor. For more information, visit Indivisible Partners, LLC maintains relationships with independent firms such as DPL Financial Partners to provide technology services that support our investment management process. These firms are not affiliated with Indivisible Partners, LLC. The names and trademarks of DPL Financial Partners are the property of their respective owners. Their inclusion in this document does not imply an endorsement or affiliation with Indivisible Partners, LLC, unless otherwise noted. As a fiduciary, Indivisible Partners, LLC is committed to acting in our clients' best interests, regardless of our business relationships.
