Elon Musk continues to siphon Tesla talent to train xAI’s Grok

Elon Musk’s xAI has now hired over a dozen Tesla employees to its language model, Grok, amid a Tesla shareholders lawsuit over the issue.

Last year, Musk launched a new AI startup, xAI, and it has been a controversial endeavor – primarily because he has himself described Tesla as “an AI company”.

A few years prior, Musk had left OpenAI, a direct competitor to xAI, officially over a “conflict of interest with Tesla” over the automaker’s own AI effort and AI talent recruitment.

It’s not clear how starting his own AI startup would be different. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for conflicts of interest to popup.

Earlier this year, we reported on Musk bizarrely asking for a 25% voting control over Tesla because of his fear that some entity could take over the company to control its AI projects.

He warned that without this level of control, he would “prefer to build products outside of Tesla”, presumably at the new xAI, which many saw as a clear conflict of interest by publicly admitting that he would focus AI efforts outside of Tesla.

Tesla shareholders are now suing Musk and Tesla’s board for a breach of fiduciary duty over his work at xAI, specifically over the threat for more control at Tesla and using Tesla resources, like diverting NVIDIA GPUs from Tesla to xAI and recruiting people from the automaker.

The latter has been an ongoing issue.

Electrek has now found over a dozen former Tesla employees who are now working at xAI, according to their LinkedIn profile.

The latest Tesla talent to move to xAI was Matteo Jin, program manager for data collection, who left Tesla after almost 5 years to become “lead tutor” at xAI:

His move from Tesla to xAI even happened after shareholders filed their lawsuit against Musk and Tesla’s board.

Based on job descriptions, “AI tutor” appears to be xAI’s term for data annotation.

We found at least 5 Tesla engineers working on AI joining xAI, but most of the more than a dozen Tesla employees who joined xAI were working on data annotation, and they are now “AI tutors” at Musk’s new startup.

Musk didn’t comment on Tesla talent going to xAI, but he did talk about how he deals with recruiting new AI talent between Tesla and xAI:

There are a few that only want to work on AGI. So what I was finding was that when trying to recruit people to Tesla, they were only interested in working on AGI and not on Tesla’s specific problems and they want to start — do a start-up. So it was a case of either they go to a start-up or — and I am involved or they do a start-up and I am not involved. Those are the two choices. This wasn’t they would come to Tesla. They were not going to come to Tesla under any circumstances.

That will likely be challenged in the court case, but it also doesn’t address the direct movement of talent from Tesla to xAI. This movement of talent comes as Musk is even going as far as suggesting that Tesla should invest into xAI.