OpenAI David Lau, former Vice President of Software Engineering at TeslaWIRED is reporting that has joined the company’s Scaling Team. It was revealed via an Slack internal message sent on Tuesday. OpenAI cofounder Greg BrockmanWho runs the scaling team?
Uday Ruddarraju is also joining Lau, as is Mike Dalton from xAI. Angela Fan from Meta, a researcher in AI, will be joining her. Dalton, like Ruddarraju, worked previously at Robinhood. Ruddarraju Dalton worked together at xAI to build Colossus – a supercomputer with more than 200,000 graphics processing units.
“We’re excited to welcome these new members to our scaling team,” said OpenAI spokesperson Hannah Wong. “Our approach is to continue building and bringing together world-class infrastructure, research, and product teams to accelerate our mission and deliver the benefits of AI to hundreds of millions of people.”
OpenAI’s scaling team manages the backend hardware and software systems and data centers, including Stargate—a new joint venture dedicated to building AI infrastructure—that allow its researchers to train cutting-edge foundation models. The work, though less buzzy than external-facing products like ChatGPT, is critical to OpenAI’s mission of achieving artificial general intelligence—and staying ahead of its rivals.
“Infrastructure is where research meets reality, and OpenAI has already demonstrated this successfully,” Ruddarraju told WIRED in a press release. “Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshot that perfectly matches the ambitious, systems-level challenges I love taking on.”
“It has become incredibly clear to me that accelerating progress towards safe, well-aligned artificial general intelligence is the most rewarding mission I could imagine for the next chapter of my career,” Lau stated in a statement.
These new hires are a result of increased competition between AI’s major players for resources and talent. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on an aggressive hiring spreeAt least seven OpenAI employees were lured away by the. unusually high Pay packages for researchers and huge amounts of computing power. Sam Altman’s CEO at OpenAI, Sam Altman was prompted to act after the maneuvers. tell staff recently that the company would likely recalibrate Its compensation to researchers will help them compete better.
WIRED confirms that Zuckerberg is also targeting a few employees at Thinking Machines Lab. The startup was led by Mira Mulrati, former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, and OpenAI Cofounder John Schulman.
The possibility of bringing in several notable figures from Tesla xAI and X could cause tensions with Elon Musk. Elon left OpenAI three years ago after a disagreement over leadership and direction. Musk is currently suing OpenAIHe accuses the company of having abandoned its mission of developing AI to benefit humanity. In 2019, the company changed from being a nonprofit to a for profit arm, and took billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft. OpenAI has counter-sued Musk accusing him unfair competition and of interfering with their business.
OpenAI has intensified the war for talent in the AI industry. ChatGPT The public will be able to see it in 2022. Recent research and executive statements have increased the likelihood of machines out-thinking humans in any situation. In anticipation of such an inflection, firms are reevaluating their hiring policies.
ChatGPT revealed that scaling is crucial for AI advancement. It is possible because models are becoming more powerful and capable as they receive more training.
The big AI firms are racing as well to discover new markets. WIRED recently reported that OpenAI and Microsoft are developing a plan AI-training for educators in all 50 states.
Update for 7/8/25 at 7pm ET The story was updated to include a new statement by OpenAI.
