OpenAI has hired four high-profile engineers away from rivals, including David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, to join the company’s scaling team, WIRED has learned. The news came via an internal Slack message sent by OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on Tuesday.
Lau is joined 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 from Meta. Both Dalton and Ruddarraju also previously worked at Robinhood. At xAI, Ruddarraju worked on building Colossus, a massive supercomputer comprising more than 200,000 GPUs.
OpenAI’s scaling team manages the backend hardware and software systems and data centers, including Stargate—a new joint venture dedicated to building AI infrastructure—that allow its researchers to train cutting-edge foundation models. The work, though less buzzy than external-facing products like ChatGPT, is critical to OpenAI’s mission of achieving artificial general intelligence—and staying ahead of its rivals.
“Infrastructure is where research meets reality, and OpenAI has already demonstrated this successfully,” Ruddarraju said in a statement to WIRED. “Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshot that perfectly matches the ambitious, systems-level challenges I love taking on.”
“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 said in a separate statement.
The new hires come amid increasing competition for talent and resources between the major players in AI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on an aggressive hiring spree, luring at least seven people from OpenAI with unusually high pay packages and vast amounts of compute for their research. The maneuvers prompted OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, to tell staff recently that the company would likely recalibrate its compensation for researchers to better compete.
Zuckerberg has also targeted a number of employees at Thinking Machines Lab, a startup led by OpenAI’s former chief technology officers, Mura Murati, along with OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, WIRED confirms.
Snagging several prominent figures from Tesla, xAI, and X, could inflame tensions between Altman and Elon Musk, who cofounded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving three years later in a dispute over direction and leadership. Musk is currently suing OpenAI, which he accuses of abandoning its original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. The company shifted from a pure nonprofit in 2019, creating a for-profit arm and then taking billions in investment from Microsoft. OpenAI is countersuing Musk, accusing him of unfair competition and interfering with its business.
The war for talent within the AI industry has been intense since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in late 2022. Things have ramped up lately, however, with some researchers and executives talking up the odds of achieving so-called artificial superintelligence, or machines that can out-think any human on any task. The prospect of reaching such a transformative inflection point first has firms rethinking what constitutes normal hiring practices.
ChatGPT also revealed scaling to be crucial to advancing AI. This is because today’s models become more capable and can display surprising new skills as more data and computer power is used in training and running those models.
Big AI companies are also racing to find new markets for their products. WIRED reported this week that OpenAI and Microsoft are developing a plan to make AI training available to educators across the US.
