Elon Musk says competition for AI engineers is 'the craziest talent war I've ever seen!'
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- Elon Musk says the race to hire skilled AI workers is "the craziest talent war" he's ever seen.
- The tech billionaire says OpenAI has been "aggressively recruiting" Tesla engineers with high pay.
- His thoughts come as Big Tech firms compete for AI expertise using personalized incentives.
Elon Musk has some strong opinions on Big Tech's brutal battle for AI workers.
"The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I've ever seen!" Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, earlier this week.
The Tesla CEO's remark comes as the competition to hire workers who can build large language models continues to heat up. The comment was in response to an article by The Information about Tesla's former machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight leaving the EV maker to join Musk's private startup xAI.
The tech billionaire noted that Knight had planned on jumping ship to OpenAI, the tech giant behind ChatGPT that Musk helped start, alongside several other engineers.
"They have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases," Musk wrote about OpenAI.
In turn, Musk said he's raising the salaries of Tesla's AI engineering team.
"There are over 200 excellent engineers in the Tesla AI/Autonomy team," he wrote on X. "Tesla's pace of progress with autonomy is accelerating."
Musk and xAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider before publication.
Hiking salaries is one of a series of tactics Big Tech leaders use to recruit the best AI talent.
"AI talents are some of the most highly compensated in today's job market," Alex Libre, the cofounder and principal recruiter of Einstellen Talent, a service that matches job candidates with generative AI startups, previously told Business Insider. He said companies offer salaries close to seven figures depending on the AI role.
CEOS like Musk are also having to get involved. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has reportedly been writing personal emails to AI researchers at Google's DeepMind, extending job offers to candidates without conducting interviews, according to The Information.
Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, has taken a similar personalized approach. He reportedly called an employee who considered leaving the search giant to join OpenAI. The worker decided to stay after being promised additional compensation, among other incentives, per the Information.
So far, the biggest players in tech with the most resources seem to be winning out. In March, Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of Google's DeepMind, became CEO of Microsoft's consumer AI division, leaving his startup Inflection AI. That same month, Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, said that his startup couldn't hire a top Meta AI researcher because it didn't have enough GPUs — Nvidia's pricey chips used to power AI models, which are also being snapped up by Big Tech.
"Companies like Meta are stealing away and holding talent," J.T. O'Donnell, the founder and CEO of career-coaching service Work It Daily, told BI regarding AI expertise. "Smaller companies are not going to be able to lure away that talent because they don't have what they need."
Still, this carousel of labor may ease once employers and employees understand the fairly new AI technology more.
"There is undoubtedly a shortage in AI talent," Libre says.