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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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