OpenAI hires 4 engineers from Tesla, xAI after Meta poaches its talent

OpenAI

The competition to hire top AI talent is getting intense, and OpenAI is back in the game after losing some of its own engineers to Meta. According to Wired, OpenAI has hired four new engineers—and they’re coming from big names like Tesla, xAI, and even Meta itself.

Here’s who just joined OpenAI:

–David Lau, who was VP of software engineering at Tesla

–Uday Ruddarraju and Mike Dalton, both formerly at Elon Musk’s xAI (and before that, at Robinhood)

–Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta

Ruddarraju and Dalton were involved in building a massive AI supercomputer called Colossus at xAI, which used over 200,000 GPUs. Now, all four are joining OpenAI’s scaling team, the group that keeps its powerful backend systems and data centers running smoothly.

Ruddarraju told Wired that he sees infrastructure as “where research meets reality” and said he’s especially excited about OpenAI’s Stargate program—a huge project focused on advanced infrastructure. Lau added that working toward safe and reliable AI is the most meaningful thing he could be doing next.

This hiring wave comes after Meta’s new AI division, called Superintelligence Labs, recently hired at least four engineers from OpenAI. That sparked a lot of buzz online. One person joked on X, “It’s draft season in the AI world.” Another said, “Join OpenAI so you can get poached by Meta for $100 million.”

It’s clear the AI talent war is heating up. With OpenAI and Meta trading top engineers, the battle to build the future of AI is getting more personal—and a lot more public.