Fight Over Tesla’s Self-Driving Pro Shows Talent War Escalating

Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) sued Sterling Anderson, the former director of its Autopilot program, last week. The electric-car maker alleged Anderson started working months ago with Chris Urmson, the former head of Google’s self-driving car program.
As quoted in the press release:

The legal fight involving autonomous-driving hot shots is the latest to show how the war for talent in Silicon Valley is heating up, as tech and auto companies alike compete for skilled engineers. Autonomous-vehicle startups are emerging at a frenetic pace after General Motors Co. and Uber Technologies Inc. valued upstarts — each with just a few dozen employees — as worth hundreds of millions of dollars in separate acquisitions last year.
“All of the sudden, people realize that self-driving cars are becoming a reality,” said Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google’s self-driving car project and researches robotics and artificial intelligence as a professor at Stanford University. “Every CEO of an automaker has made autonomous cars a priority, and 2016 was the year when people of influence woke up to the potential of this.”

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