OpenAI Poaches 4 High-Ranking Engineers From Tesla, xAI, and Meta

OpenAI Poaches 4 High-Ranking Engineers From Tesla, xAI, and Meta | WIRED

The new hires are joining OpenAI’s scaling team, according to an internal Slack message sent by cofounder Greg Brockman.

wired.com

OpenAI just poached four heavyweight engineers—David Lau (former Tesla VP of software), Uday Ruddarraju (ex-head of infra at xAI/X), Mike Dalton (xAI infra guru), and Angela Fan (AI researcher from Meta)—to join its scaling team. Announced via a Greg Brockman Slack shout-out, these hires bring deep experience building massive supercomputers (hello, 200K+ GPU clusters) and will help run Stargate, OpenAI’s joint-venture infrastructure project powering tomorrow’s models.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum: Meta’s been on a hiring spree, Sam Altman’s tweaking compensation to hold onto talent, and Elon Musk’s lawsuit adds extra spice to the AI arms race. At the end of the day, nailing the backend hardware and software is what turns flashy research into real-world AI magic.