Elon Musk doesn't care if Tesla employees graduated high school

Billionaire engineer Elon Musk said it doesn't matter if artificial intelligence (AI) experts who want to work for Tesla graduated high school.

Musk is looking for people to join his team of AI engineers, who will report "directly" to him via in-person meetings, emails and text messages "every day," showing how "critically" he views AI, he wrote in a Feb. 2 tweet.

When a Twitter user responded to the tweet asking if a PhD is necessary to get the job, Musk replied, "A PhD is definitely not required. All that matters is a deep understanding of AI [and] ability to implement NNs in a way that is actually useful (latter point is what’s truly hard). Don’t care if you even graduated high school."

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The SpaceX founder explained the details of Tesla's goals to perfect autopilot AI for its self-driving vehicles in the Feb. 2 Twitter thread, saying the carmaker will "soon have over a million connected vehicles worldwide with sensors [and] compute needed for full self-driving, which is orders of magnitude more than anyone else combined."

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The AI job in question "far exceeds anything else in volume production," which Musk said will give engineers the hardware they "need to run sophisticated nets."

Telsa's "training supercomputer will be able to process vast amounts of video training data [and] efficiently run hypersparce arrays with a vast number of parameters, plenty of memory [and] ultra-high bandwidth between cores," Musk said.

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He concluded the thread saying Tesla is also looking for "world-class chip designers" to join the team in Palo Alto, California, and Austin, Texas, adding, "Educational background is irrelevant, but all must pass [a] hardcore coding test."

Musk's comments come as a growing need for AI and robotics engineers is met with a lack of skilled workers in these areas of expertise. As a result, tech apprenticeships are starting to become more common, giving those who are passionate about AI, robotics and other advanced technology an opportunity to become experts in important fields without spending tens of thousands of dollars on college degrees.