xAI hired Tesla engineer who planned to join OpenAI

A machine learning engineer at Tesla named Ethan Knight has jointed artificial intelligence comany xAI, who prevously decided to join OpenAI.

Both Tesla and xAI are lead by billioniare Elon Musk who reacted to a report published by TheInformation about Knight’s departure. He was responsible for the comany’s development on computer vision program for self-driving technology in Tesla vehicles.

Musk said that Knight was about to join OpenAI “so it was either xAI or them”. He explained the OpenAI has been approaching to the Tesla engineers to lure them with big compensation offers.

“OpenAI have unfortunately been succesful in a few cases” Musk wrote on social media site X on Wednesday.

Ethan Knight xAI Engineer, Formerly at Tesla (image Credit: X)

OpenAI and Microsoft making major progress in the world of generative AI and machine learning technologies. To scale up the developments, these two AI firms are recruiting talent from different companies including Tesla.

The EV maker is currently working on improving its autonomy sector specially for the full self-driving (FSD). The engineers are making changes in its architecture for a stable driving experience without driver’s interventions.

xAI on the other hand is a new startup found last year by Tesla CEO. It is focusing on generative AI and aims to compete against OpenAI. The official talent pool of xAI shows former researchers from Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI and other prominent companies.

It also launched a large language model (LLM) named Grok in November. Its engineers are developing this model to improve its effiicency and performance with more data training. Musk is also co-founder of OpenAI but left the company to focus on Tesla and other businesses in early years.

Adding important talent would help xAI to increase AI development as the company has officially added him into its team page.