Elon Musk the CEO of Tesla Inc. has acknowledged that his company has challenges in retaining their AI experts, some even walk to the company he is forming in the AI field, xAI. Tesla came up with this choice by paying the AI engineering staff more by the fulfillment of performance standards. Musk characterized the battle for recruiting these talents as the wildest talent competition that he has ever seen!
Every tech giant is in pursuit of AI talent which kept increasing between OpenAI, Tesla’s xAI, Facebook, and DeepMind in a current tacit war, especially on who can employ the best-minded people and get them involved in AI development.
The recent remarks made by Elon Musk to the press regarding the aggressive staffing tactics that OpenAI is reportedly deploying and the fact that Musk has noted that Tesla has lost several employees to the AI research project have given an insight into the cutthroat nature of the fierce talent competition.
Musk’s response was provoked by the resignation of Ethan Knight, a machine-learning scientist working with Tesla who now joined xAI which is Musk’s own open AI venture too. Knight had almost been lured to work with OpenAI as well.
Elon Musk stated that the ironclad recruitment drives of Open AI, fully- supported by valuable compensations, are one of the difficult issues when Tesla wants to hold their AI problem solvers.
Another important detail is that, in 2015, Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI and left their board in 2018 and later sued the organization and CEO Sam Altman. In his opinion, Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s cooperation for commercial considerations contradicts the blueprint of OpenAI design, which mentioned the most relevant factor to be human in the benefit of AI.
Because of this, xAI was launched by Musk in 2023 as the oppositional model to OpenAI and Google bots, focusing on creating the “maximum truth-seeking AI” that will govern how it functions.
This example demonstrates that top-notch AI human resources in the tech industry may be regarded as the key resource and the giants in the AI industry are willing to make any effort and offer the most attractive packages to attract the grown talent from competitors.
