AI talent wars: Altman's OpenAI poaches top engineers from Musk, Zuckerberg firms

Time of India

6 days ago

Meta started the trend last month, and now OpenAI is following it. The Sam Altman-led artificial intelligence (AI) forerunner has poached four top engineers from rivals run by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg , according to a Wired report.The ChatGPT parent has hired David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla , for its scaling team, per the report. The company has also onboarded 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.Ruddarraju and Dalton worked on building the 200,000-GPU supercomputer, Colossus, for xAI. Claimed to be the world's biggest supercomputer, it is used to train Grok AI models.OpenAI's scaling team is responsible for the backend hardware and software systems and data centres, including its $500 billion AI infrastructure project, Stargate. This team is critical to OpenAI's work towards developing artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI systems that can match human-level cognition.AGI—the next big thing in AI—has also become a point of contention between OpenAI and its significant investor, Microsoft. The tech giant wants to scrap terms of its current collaboration with the AI major that limit its access to the latter's AGI capabilities . High-stakes talks between the two hit a snag in June, with Microsoft reportedly prepared to walk away Meanwhile, Meta continues to poach top AI talent from rivals, including Apple's head AI executive, Ruoming Pang , its latest hire. Pang, the manager in charge of Apple's foundation models team, will join for a multimillion-dollar salary, Bloomberg reported.The newly created Superintelligence Labs intends to create AI systems that surpass human capabilities. Zuckerberg has been hiring aggressively for this venture, offering $100 million bonuses and the chance to bag $300 million in the next three to four years.Meta finalised a $14.3 billion investment in data labelling startup Scale AI last month. In return, it onboarded Scale cofounder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer to lead its Superintelligence Labs. The startup provides vast amounts of accurately labelled data to clients like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google for training their AI models.It has bagged top talent from companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and GitHub, after top-level exits and a poor reception for its latest open-source Llama 4 model.