OPENAI Having hired four high-level engineers far from the rivals, including David Lau, former vice-president of Tesla software engineering, to join the company’s setting up, Wired learned. The news came by an internal Slack message on Tuesday sent by the co -founder of Openai, Greg Brockman, who heads the scaling team.
Lau is joined by Uday Ruddarraju, the former infrastructure engineering chief at Xai and X, Mike Dalton, XAI infrastructure engineer, and Angela Fan, IA researcher from Meta. Dalton and Ruddarraju also worked before at Robinhood. In Xai, Ruddarraju and Dalton both worked on Colossus Building, a massive supercomputer comprising more than 200,000 GPUs.
“We are delighted to welcome these new members to our scaling team,” said Openai spokesperson Hannah Wong. “Our approach is to continue to constitute and bring together world class, research and products infrastructure teams to accelerate our mission and offer the advantages of AI to hundreds of millions of people.”
The Openai scaling team manages Backend hardware and software systems and data centers, including Stargate – a new joint venture dedicated to the construction of the IA infrastructure – which allow its researchers to train advanced foundation models. The work, although less buzzing than external products like Chatgpt, is essential to OpenAi’s mission to carry out the general artificial intelligence – and to remain ahead of its rivals.
“The infrastructure is the place where research meets reality, and Openai has already successfully demonstrated it,” said Ruddarraju in a statement in Wired. “Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshot that perfectly corresponds to the ambitious challenges in terms of systems that I like to take up.”
“It has become incredibly clear for me that the acceleration of progress towards safe and well -aligned artificial intelligence is the most rewarding mission that I can imagine for the next chapter of my career,” said Lau in a separate statement.
The new hires are involved in the middle of increasing competition for talents and resources between the main actors of AI. The meta-PDG, Mark Zuckerberg, was on a madness of aggressive hiring, attracting at least seven people from Openai with unusual remuneration packages and large quantities of calculation for their research. The maneuvers prompted the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, to say recently to the staff that the company will probably recalibrate its compensation for the researchers to be better in competition.
Zuckerberg has also targeted a number of employees at Thinke Machines Lab, a startup led by former Openai technology directors, Mira Murati, as well as the co -founder of Openai John Schulman, confirms Wired.
The hanging of several important characters from Tesla, Xai and X could ignite tensions between Altman and Elon Musk, who co -founded Openai in 2015 before leaving three years later in a dispute over direction and leadership. Musk is currently pursuing Openai, which he accuses of abandoning his original mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity. The company went from a pure non -profit organization in 2019, creating a for -profit arm, then taking billions of microsoft investment. Openai is countering musk, accusing it of unfair competition and interfere with his business.
The war of the talents within the AI industry was intense since Openai published Chatgpt to the public at the end of 2022. Things have however increased lately, some researchers and leaders have spoken of the chances of achieving the so-called artificial superinggence, or machines that may think too much of any human on any task. The prospect of achieving such a transformative inflection point has companies rethink what constitutes normal hiring practices.
Chatgpt also revealed that the scaling was crucial to advance the AI. Indeed, today’s models become more capable and can display new surprising skills because more data and computer power are used in the training and management of these models.
Large AI companies are also underway to find new markets for their products. Wired reported this week that Optaai and Microsoft are developing a plan to put AI training at the disposal of educators in the United States.
Update 7/8/25 7 p.m. He: This story has been updated with an Openai declaration.
