In the latest AI talent raid, OpenAI has reportedly hired four experienced software engineers, including a senior executive from Elon Musk-owned Tesla.
David Lau, the former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, is all set to join OpenAI’s scaling team led by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, according to a report by Wired. Uday Ruddarraju and Mike Dalton, who used to work in the infrastructure engineering team at xAI, have also reportedly been hired by OpenAI along with ex-Meta AI researcher Angela Fan.
Ruddarraju and Dalton were reportedly involved in building xAI’s massive supercomputer ‘Colossus’ comprising clusters of over 2,00,000 Graphics Processing Unit (GPUs). They also previously worked together at online trading platform Robinhood.
The four recent hires will be part of OpenAI’s scaling team, which is reportedly responsible for managing the backend AI infrastructure such as data centres that have been commissioned under the Stargate Project, a joint venture that was announced by US President Donald Trump at the start of the year.
OpenAI’s move to scoop up these high-profile engineers comes amid a rapidly intensifying war for talent within the tech industry. While AI researchers and engineers have been in high demand since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the race to acquire top talent has intensified in recent months as companies accelerate their push toward achieving artificial general intelligence or AGI.
“We’re excited to welcome these new members to our scaling team. 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,” an OpenAI spokesperson was quoted as saying by Wired.
“Infrastructure is where research meets reality, and OpenAI has already demonstrated this successfully. Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshot that perfectly matches the ambitious, systems-level challenges I love taking on,” Ruddarraju reportedly told the tech news outlet.
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“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 was quoted as saying.
Meta’s hunt for AI talent
Meta has been on an aggressive poaching spree over the past few weeks. It has successfully hired away at least seven AI researchers from rival OpenAI, luring them with purportedly high compensation packages to join its newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) led by Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang and former Github CEO Nat Friedman.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led company recently hired Ruoming Pang to join MSL. Pang was said to be one of Apple’s top executives working on AI.
His exit from Apple might have a considerable impact on the iPhone-maker’s AI ambitions, especially since its flagship Apple Intelligence offerings have already been delayed. Meta offered Pang a pay package of over $200 million to join MSL, according to a report by Bloomberg.
