3 days ago
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.
