Openai hired four high -profile engineers away from rivals, including David Lau, former Vice President of program engineering at TeslaTo join the company’s scale team, Wired learned. The news came with an internal slow message on Tuesday sent by Openai -Counter Greg Brockmanwhich manages the scale team.
Lau is registered by Uday Ruddarraju, the former head of infrastructure engineering at Xai and X, Mike Dalton, an infrastructure engineer from Xai, and Angela Fan, an AI researcher of Meta. Both Dalton and Ruddarraju also previously worked at Robinhood. At Xai, Ruddarraju and Dalton both worked on building Colossus, a massive supercomputer consisting of over 200,000 GPUs.
“We are excited to welcome these new members to our scale team,” said Openai spokesman Hannah. “Our approach is to continue construction and assemble world -famous infrastructure, research and product equipment to accelerate our mission and deliver the benefits of AI to hundreds of millions of people.”
Openai’s scale team manages the backend device and software systems and data centers, including Stargate-new joint venture dedicated to building AI infrastructure-which allows their researchers to train newest models. The work, though less nasty than external products such as Chatgpt, is critical to Openai’s mission to achieve artificial general intelligence-and staying before its rivals.
“Infrastructure is where research meets reality, and Openai has already proved this successfully,” Ruddarraju said in a statement to Wired. “Stargate is especially an infrastructure lunch that perfectly matches the ambitious, systematic challenges I love.”
“It has become incredibly clear to me that accelerating progress to a safe, well -aligned artificial general intelligence is the most rewarding mission I could imagine for the next chapter of my career,” Lau said in a separate statement.
The new jobs come in the midst of growing competition for talent and resources among the leading players in AI. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta aggressive employmentattracting at least seven people from Openai with Unusually high Payment packages and extensive amounts of computing for their research. The maneuvers prompted the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, to Tell staff recently that the company is likely to recalibrate Its compensation for researchers is better competing.
Zuckerberg also targeted a number of employees at Thinking Machines Lab, a start -up led by Openai’s former major technology officers, Mira Murati, along with Openai -co -founder John Schulman, Wired confirms.
To embrace several prominent figures from Tesla, Xai, and X, could swell tensions between Altman and Elon Musk, who co -founded Openai in 2015 before leaving three years later in a dispute over direction and leadership. Musk is Openai is currently processingwhich he accuses of leaving his original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. The company changed from clean non -profit in 2019, creating a non -profit arm and then taking billions of Microsoft investments. Openai fights Musk, accusing him of unfair competition and interference in his business.
The war for talent within the AI industry has been intense since OpenAI released Chatgpt To the public at the end of 2022. Things have been accompanied recently, yet some researchers and executives talking about the probability of achieving so -called artificial superintelligence, or machines that can come up with any human being about any task. The outlook to achieve such a transformative inflection point first has companies to rethink what constitutes normal employment practices.
Chatgpt also revealed that scaling is crucial to progressing AI. This is because today’s models are becoming more capable and can show surprising new skills because more data and computer power are used in training and operation of these models.
Large AI companies are also racing to find new markets for their products. Wired reported this week that Openai and Microsoft develops a plan To provide AI training to educators across the United States.
Update 7/8/25 19:00 ET: This story was updated by an Openai statement.
