Elon Musk's star xAI engineer Uday Ruddarraju jumps ship to OpenAI

Reflecting on his journey, Ruddarraju described his time at xAI as an "unforgettable ride."

Elon Musk's AI venture, xAI, has lost one of its top engineering leaders to rival AI heavyweight OpenAI. Uday Ruddarraju, who played a pivotal role in building the core infrastructure of Musk's xAI, confirmed his exit recently.

Uday Ruddarraju thanked Elon Musk, saying that learning from him was the best part about working at xAI. (X)

In a post on X, Ruddarraju said, "Jensen Huang was right. Elon and his teams are singular in what they can achieve. I'm grateful to have played a small part in shaping the future of AI Compute from the inside."

Ruddarraju's departure marks a significant moment for xAI, especially considering his central role in creating Colossus, the supercomputer at the heart of Musk's AI ambitions.

Designed to handle immense computational loads, Colossus boasts over 200,000 GPUs and was instrumental in training Grok 3, xAI's latest generative AI model.

"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," he further wrote.

Ruddarraju then went on to thank Elon Musk, stating that learning from him was the best part about working at xAI.

"Thank you, @elonmusk and everyone at xAI, for the rare opportunity to help build something truly foundational with Colossus. It was a privilege to be part of a mission this bold, and to see from the inside what relentless focus and execution really look like. Reporting into Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI," he said.

Ruddarraju's also revealed his next move, signalling a shift in the broader AI landscape.

Hours after announcing his exit from xAI, Ruddarraju confirmed he was headed to OpenAI.

The AI talent war is heating up

Recently, it was learned that Meta had been poaching AI talent from across the industry by offering millions of dollars in compensation. Reports suggest that Meta has secured several talented individuals by offering them multi-million-dollar contracts, especially from OpenAI.

Meta reportedly hired Trapit Bansal, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, and Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI, with Mark Zuckerberg offering lucrative salaries to lure top talent. So, it’s only fitting that OpenAI pulled a UNO reverse on Meta.