OpenAI has reportedly poached four prominent AI engineers and researchers from their rivals, per a report by Wired. David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, Uday Ruddarraju, former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and X, Mike Dalton, another infrastructure engineer from xAI and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta, all have joined OpenAI.
Co-founder and president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, confirmed the news on X and welcomed the four new hires.
The report said that the researchers will be joining OpenAI’s scaling team which handles the backend hardware and software systems and data centres including Stargate.
Per the report, Ruddarraju and Dalton were both working on building xAI’s Colossus, believed to be the world’s largest supercomputer comprising more than 200,000 GPUs.
In a post on X Ruddarraju bid farewell to X saying, “When I first joined, I thought everyone was absolutely nuts for thinking we could deploy 100K GPUs in 4 months, especially without a fully functioning site. Watching us go and double that, and most importantly successfully train Grok 3 made me incredibly proud... and very happy to be wrong.”
Talent poaching in AI is becoming increasingly aggressive after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poached from competitors including OpenAI for his new Superintelligence team. A total of seven high profile AI researchers from OpenAI have now joined Meta’s AGI team.
Last week, Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI reportedly sent out an internal memo promising to recalibrate. Chen described Meta’s actions saying he felt like “someone has broken into our home and stolen something.”
