Elon Musk says he's raising Tesla engineer salaries to stop OpenAI from poaching

It would seem there's a bit of a cold war going on in Silicon Valley, as firms compete to try to either lure or retain workers with expertise that can help in artificial intelligence (AI) development.

The news comes via a typically frank series of posts from Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter) in which the Tesla CEO and billionaire claimed that OpenAI has reportedly been making lucrative offers to a range of Tesla workers.

He was posting in response to a story about a senior computing engineer leaving Tesla to join OpenAI, and alleges that OpenAI "have been aggressively recruiting Tesla engineers with massive compensation offers and have unfortunately been successful in a few cases."

Musk went on to explain in a follow-up post saying: "The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen!".

That's quite an admission for someone who's been around for some of the biggest boom eras since the internet arrived and showcases just how in-demand AI has become for major companies, let alone those that actually design AI tools.

The response that Tesla has worked on to counteract the temptation to jump ship is a pretty traditional one, too, as Musk explained in a further post.

He wrote: "Tesla is increasing comp (contingent on progress milestones) of our AI engineering team".

What those progress milestones look like is presumably individualised, but one would assume they're relatively achievable in order for the move to really work.

After all, while pay isn't the only reason for some people to stay in a given role, it certainly helps, and if OpenAI has to stretch further to apparently offer these workers alternative roles, that suits Tesla, too.

All of that is to ignore the fact that Musk doesn't just have Tesla engineers under his control - he also owns and operates his own AI business, xAI, so he has a lot of skin in this game.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is staying quiet, and hasn't made any public comment on the discussion.

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that this sort of competitive hiring is going on, given how AI has risen in prominence over the last couple of years. It's gone from a distant concept that was in use only in certain industries to one that seems to suffuse our daily lives. And there are surely more AI companies that are going to want to hire the best staff from existing companies.

Whether it's AI-generated images shared without qualification on sites like Facebook, or workers who have started to rely on ChatGPT to help them write emails in pressured situations, the technology has started to permeate our lives already.

This has come hand-in-hand with some fairly dire predictions about what this means for workers in the long-term, too - recent research suggested that the UK alone could see up to eight million jobs lost if AI isn't regulated in the workplace.

OpenAI has been contacted for comment.