Sam Altman's OpenAI hires top talents from Elon Musk's Tesla, xAI, Meta amid AI race; know their names, roles, more

OpenAI has recently hired four highly experienced engineers from big tech companies like Tesla, xAI, and Meta to strengthen its AI infrastructure team, known as the scaling team. This news was shared in an internal Slack message by OpenAI’s cofounder Greg Brockman, who leads the team.

One of the key hires is David Lau, the former Vice President of Software Engineering at Tesla. He is joined by Uday Ruddarraju, who previously led infrastructure engineering at xAI and X (formerly Twitter), along with Mike Dalton, another infrastructure expert from xAI. Both Ruddarraju and Dalton also worked at Robinhood earlier in their careers. The fourth new team member is Angela Fan, an AI researcher who comes from Meta.

At xAI, Ruddarraju and Dalton worked on building Colossus, a massive supercomputer that uses over 200,000 GPUs to power advanced AI research.

An OpenAI spokesperson, Hannah Wong, said, “We’re excited to welcome these new members to our scaling team. Our goal is to keep building strong infrastructure, research, and product teams so we can bring the benefits of AI to hundreds of millions of people.”

The scaling team plays a critical role at OpenAI. It manages the powerful hardware, software systems, and data centres needed to train the company’s advanced AI models. One major project they’re working on is Stargate, a large-scale joint venture focused on building AI infrastructure.

While the public mostly sees OpenAI’s front-facing products like ChatGPT, much of the real progress in AI depends on powerful back-end systems like those run by the scaling team. Lau shared that working towards safe and well-aligned artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the most exciting and meaningful mission for the next phase of his career. Ruddarraju added that Stargate is the perfect challenge for someone who enjoys solving ambitious, system-level problems.

This wave of hiring comes at a time when competition in the AI industry is heating up. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been aggressively hiring top talent, including several people from OpenAI, offering high salaries and large amounts of computing power. In response, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told employees that they might need to review pay structures to remain competitive.

Meanwhile, tensions between Altman and Elon Musk—who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018—may rise again. Musk is currently suing OpenAI, accusing it of straying from its original nonprofit mission. OpenAI has responded with a countersuit, accusing Musk of unfair business tactics.

As companies race to develop more powerful AI tools—and potentially reach artificial superintelligence—many are rethinking how they hire and retain top talent. OpenAI and Microsoft are also working on ways to bring AI training tools to schools and educators in the US.

In today’s fast-moving AI world, having the best infrastructure and top engineers is just as important as having smart algorithms.