Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric vehicle giant is giving its artificial intelligence engineers a raise as the automaker tries to fend off poaching efforts by ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The tech billionaire made the revelation in a series of X posts Wednesday, confirming a report from The Information that Tesla machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight left for Musk's AI startup, xAI. "Ethan was going to join OpenAI, so it was either xAI or them," Musk wrote.
The AI frenzy has put AI engineers in high demand, even as tech companies have done waves of layoffs in other areas over the past year. Musk was among OpenAI's co-founders in 2015 but left the board in 2018. He is suing the company and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the organization breached its founding agreement to develop AI for the benefit of humanity, rather than for profit, by partnering with Microsoft.