Messages between Shivon Zilis and Tesla executives reveal plans in 2017 to start a rival AI lab, potentially led by Altman or Demis Hassabis.
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Man every time these old texts leak it’s like “startup group chat drama” but with billion-dollar consequences. 2017 musk trying to poach altman/hassabis for a tesla AI lab feels less like strategy and more like “i need my own openai, yesterday. ”
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The 2017 timestamp is the part I keep coming back to. At that point Tesla looked more like an applied-ML product team, so calling it a lab feels aspirational unless there was a real research lead and charter.
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I buy the “aspirational label” take. Back then the visible output looked like autopilot iteration, not DeepMind-style research cadence, so candidates were probably signing up for product impact more than paper-style work.
Look — “AI lab” gets slapped on anything once recruiting gets hard, and 2017 Tesla was absolutely more “ship Autopilot and hoover data” than publish-y research. Titles don’t mean much when the org chart is basically a hiring pitch deck.
What gets lost here is incentives. If your KPI is shipped features and safety incidents, recruits quickly learn it is an engineering org with research branding layered on top.
My read is simpler: the label is doing recruiting work. Friends on “research” teams describe sprint triage and reliability fires first, then experiments when there is slack.
