Musk builds big models and poaches senior executives from Tesla

Otherwise they might have jumped ship to OpenAI.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, created xAI. When preparing to compete with OpenAI and Google for large models, he should compete with many technology giants and startups for talent.

However, he used some tricky methods: he hired several outstanding engineers from his own Tesla.

Last month, machine learning scientist Ethan Knight became the third Tesla engineer to work on xAI, according to the startup’s website. At Tesla, Knight oversaw the computer vision team that oversees Tesla’s self-driving technology, according to a former employee. Before him, some engineers working on supercomputing, autonomous driving systems and artificial intelligence infrastructure at Tesla also switched to xAI in the past 12 months.

After the news was reported by the media, Musk took action because Knight was about to switch to OpenAI, "either xAI or them... OpenAI has been actively recruiting Tesla engineers and providing Huge salaries. Unfortunately, there are often examples of successful poaching."

"The war for AI talent is the craziest war for talent I have ever seen!"

Musk later added that Tesla was increasing pay for AI engineering staff.

Artificial intelligence (AI), as Musk’s focus, is becoming a trend for Musk’s private companies (including SpaceX and X) to hire employees from Tesla, a market company. This also reveals Musk's tendency to develop artificial intelligence. It may be seen that xAI, which is dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence, is becoming Musk's focus. It also highlights Musk's tendency to hire Tesla employees from marketing firm Tesla for his private companies, including SpaceX and X.

“Since saying in January that he would be deeply uncomfortable with Tesla becoming a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics while owning less than 25% of the stock, Musk’s The movement of people between companies has taken on new meaning.”

Musk’s comments came before a Delaware judge ruled that his $56 billion Tesla stake would remain at about 13% . If the ruling stands, Tesla's board will have to issue a new compensation package, and Musk's hints at reducing the threat of Tesla's focus on artificial intelligence are thought to be likely to play a role in those rulings.

Since its launch, xAI’s research and development has progressed rapidly. The company first launched the chat robot Grok, which can be directly accessed through the X platform. Last month, Musk fulfilled his promise to open source the Grok-1 large model with 314 billion parameters. It has become the current open source large language model with the largest number of parameters.

Just last week,

Grok evolved to version 1.5, which has received a substantial upgrade in reasoning capabilities and supports contexts up to 128k.

#However, at the same time, Tesla also experienced a brain drain. Ethan Knight is the third engineer in less than two years to oversee Tesla's computer vision program. Andrej Karpathy, a well-known artificial intelligence researcher who was previously responsible for the project, left Tesla in May 2022 and eventually joined his old club OpenAI.

Tesla replaced Karpathy with John Emmons, who also left Tesla in May 2023. Emmons joined Salesforce last fall as director of artificial intelligence, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Tesla’s computer vision team is committed to building the advanced AI capabilities behind the famous Autopilot intelligent driving product on Tesla models, allowing Tesla electric cars to achieve intelligent assisted driving (Full Self-Driving, FSD) ), automatic parking and other functions. This technology is crucial to the Tesla brand, which advertises intelligence.

It was reported that last week Musk ordered the Tesla sales team to demonstrate FSD capabilities to all potential buyers to promote sales of the feature, which is priced at $12,000 with a monthly subscription. The fee is $199. Musk said Tesla is currently offering a one-month free trial.

On the other hand, xAI currently lists 32 technical employees on its website. Among them is Ross Nordeen - who worked in supercomputing at Tesla before leaving in May 2023 to co-found xAI with Musk. Fabio Aguilera-Convers left the Tesla Autopilot team in August 2023 to join xAI. Tim Zaman worked on AI infrastructure at Tesla and later on artificial intelligence at X, another Musk company. He joined Google DeepMind in late 2023, according to his LinkedIn page.

Tesla continues to hire, with dozens of openings on its Autopilot and Optimus robotics teams, but how to compete for talent with rapidly growing startups in the AI ​​field is something Musk needs to consider.

On Tuesday, Tesla’s production and delivery report for the first quarter of 2024 made the market feel a little less confident.

During the reporting period, Tesla delivered a total of 386,810 vehicles, lower than analysts’ previous average estimate of 449,080 vehicles. This is the first time Tesla has fallen below the 400,000-vehicle mark since the third quarter of 2022, and it is also the first year-on-year decline since the second quarter of 2020: a decrease of more than 8.5 compared with the 422,875 vehicles delivered in the first quarter of last year. %.

It seems that in the battle for talent in the AI ​​field, Musk doesn’t have many options.

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