Openai Wired learned that it has hired four high-profile engineers, including David Lau, former Tesla vice president of software engineering, to join the company’s expansion team. The news was sent Tuesday through Openai co-founder Greg Brockman, who runs the score team.
Lau joined with Uday Ruddarraju, former head of infrastructure engineering at Xai and X, with infrastructure engineer Mike Dalton at XAI and AI researcher Angela Fan at Meta. Both Dalton and Ruddarraju worked in Robinhood before. At Xai, Ruddarraju and Dalton are both building Colossus, a massive supercomputer that includes over 200,000 GPUs.
“We are delighted to welcome these new members to our expansion team,” said Hannah Wong, an Openai spokesman. “Our approach is to continue building and bringing together world-class infrastructure, research and product teams to accelerate our mission and bring the benefits of AI to hundreds of millions of people.”
OpenAI’s expansion team manages back-end hardware, software systems and data centers including Stargate (a new joint venture dedicated to building AI infrastructure), and the company allows its researchers to train cutting-edge fundamental models. This work, though more than the buzz of externally facing products like Chatgpt, is crucial to Openai’s mission to achieve the task of artificial universal intelligence and stay ahead of competitors.
“Infrastructure is where research fits reality, and Openai has successfully proved that,” Ruddarraju said in a statement to Wired. “Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshock that exactly matches the ambitious system-level challenges I like to take on.”
“It’s incredible for me to accelerate the advancement towards security, installation of good artificial universal intelligence is the most meaningful mission I can imagine in the next chapter of my career,” Law said in another statement.
New employees are increasingly competing for talent and resources among major AI players. Fung Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been in a radical hiring frenzy, luring at least seven people from Openai who are very high in salary and do a lot of research calculations. The operation prompted Openai CEO Sam Altman to tell employees that the company may recalibrate its compensation for better competition for researchers.
Zuckerberg also targeted many of the employees of Thinking Machines Lab, led by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, and John Schulman, confirmed by OpenAI co-founder, Wilired.
Snatching up several outstanding figures from Tesla, XAI and X could infuriate tensions between Altman and Elon Musk, who co-founded Openai with Openai in 2015 and then left direction and leadership three years later. Musk is currently suing Openai, accusing him of giving up his original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. The company transformed from a pure nonprofit organization in 2019, creating a for-profit division and then gained billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft. Openai is fighting back against Musk, accusing him of unfair competition and interfering with his business.
The war on talent in the AI industry has been fierce since Openai released Chatgpt to the public at the end of 2022. But recently, some researchers and executives are talking about the chances of achieving so-called artificial superintelligence, or the possibility of putting anyone into practice on any task. The prospect of reaching such a turning point in the transformation first makes the company rethink what constitutes normal recruitment practices.
Chatgpt also reveals that scaling is crucial to advancing AI. This is because today’s models have become more capable and can show surprisingly new skills as more and more data and computer power are used to train and run these models.
Large AI companies are also competing for new markets in search of their products. Wired reported this week that Openai and Microsoft are developing a plan to enable American educators to provide AI training.
Updated 7/8/25 7pm ET: This story has been updated with Openai’s statement.
