OpenAI Poaches Cracked Engineers from Tesla, xAI, and Meta

OpenAI has hired four senior engineers from xAI, Tesla, and Meta, as reported by WIRED on July 8, citing a Slack message sent by OpenAI’s co-founder, Greg Brockman.

The company has hired David Lau, former VP of software engineering at Tesla; Uday Ruddaraji, 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.

Ruddarraju and Dalton worked on building xAI’s Colossus, the supercomputer comprising more than 200,000 GPUs. 

Soon, Brockman confirmed the same in a post on X. 

“We’re excited to welcome these new members to our scaling team,” said OpenAI spokesperson Hannah Wong, as quoted by WIRED. “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.”

The development occurs at a time when Meta has been actively recruiting several key engineers and researchers from OpenAI to form a ‘superintelligence’ team. Reports suggest that some of these individuals received signing bonuses of approximately $100 million. 

Most recently, Bloomberg reported that Meta hired Yuanzhi Li, a researcher from OpenAI, on July 7. 

Commenting on this active poaching between the two companies, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in an interview with Bloomberg, said, “Obviously, some people will go to different places. There’s a lot of excitement in the industry,” and indicated that he feels ‘fine’ about the departures. 

However, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, OpenAI’s head of recruiting, said on X a few days ago, “It’s unethical (and reeks of desperation) to give people ‘exploding offers’ that expire within hours, and to ask them to sign before they even have a chance to tell their current manager. Meta, you know better than this. Put people first”