Is Sam Altman’s OpenAI, the world leader in generative artificial intelligence, trying to poach staff away from Tesla’s Autopilot team? Elon Musk certainly wants people to think so. After news emerged on Wednesday that Tesla’s Ethan Knight became the carmaker’s fourth engineer to join Musk’s latest startup, xAI, the centibillionaire claimed his employee was planning to defect to OpenAI anyway.
“It was either xAI or them,” wrote the man who lured his first AI director away from Altman in 2017, adding he was boosting the AI engineers’ pay. “[OpenAI has] been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and [has] unfortunately been successful in a few cases.”
Musk, who cofounded OpenAI more than eight years ago, maintains an ongoing feud with Altman and is actively suing his former partner.
