The company behind ChatGPT tries to regain its footing as the talent war heats up.
After weeks of internal turmoil and high-profile poaching by rivals, the company behind ChatGPT is attempting to get back on offense, starting with some poaching of its own.
The past month has been especially bruising for OpenAI. Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has raided the company for some of its top AI talent, luring away roughly a dozen elite researchers with promises of big money, greater autonomy, and a shared mission to build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
The steady stream of exits hurt morale. In response, OpenAI gave all employees a week off to recharge. But now, the company appears to be countering with its own recruiting victories.
According to Wired, OpenAI has quietly hired four high-profile engineers from rival firms. Among them is David Lau, former Vice President of Software Engineering at Tesla; Uday Ruddarraju, the former Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Elon Musk’s xAI and X (formerly Twitter); Mike Dalton, also from xAI; and Angela Fan, an AI researcher who previously worked at Meta. Both Dalton and Ruddarraju had been key engineers on Colossus, xAI’s massive supercomputer project.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday at the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, an elite gathering of tech and media executives, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman brushed off the defections.
