Elon Musk Raises Tesla Pay for AI Engineers to Retain Talent Amid OpenAI Poaching Threat

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that his company has to make efforts to retain its artificial intelligence engineers as the talent hunt in the AI field heats up.

Elon Musk said on April 4 that his electric vehicle (EV) company is increasing compensation for the AI engineering team in response to OpenAI’s poaching efforts of Tesla engineers.

After The Information reported on April 3 that Tesla machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight is leaving for Mr. Musk’s AI startup, xAI, the tech billionaire posted on X, saying Mr. Knight will join OpenAI.

“Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them,” Mr. Musk wrote. “They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases.”

In another post, Mr. Musk downplayed Knight’s departure, assuring that many talents at his EV company are making progress, saying, “There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team. Tesla’s pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating.”

Read Full Article Here