Elon Musk’s Tesla has lost its top AI expert. AI director and Autopilot Vision team leader Andrey Karpathy is leaving the company after five years as NHTSA ramps up its investigation into more than 200 crashes involving Tesla Autopilot.
TechCrunch reports that Andrey Karpaty, an in-depth analysis and computer vision specialist hired by Tesla five years ago to lead the company’s Autopilot team and serve as the company’s AI director, has left the company.
Tesla car in autopilot mode crashes into a parked police car in California (Laguna Beach Police Department)
Elon Musk examines the broken windows of the Cybertruck. (Ringo HW Chiu/AP)
Karpathy had been on leave for four months, which led many to believe that he would never return to the company. In a recent tweet, Karpathy wrote: “Helping Tesla achieve its goals over the past 5 years has been a real pleasure and it’s hard to make the decision to leave. During this time Autopilot has gone from keeping lane to city streets and seeing a very strong Autopilot team maintain that momentum. I look forward to it.”
Karpathy said he has no plans for what he can do next, but wants to spend more time “rethinking his long-standing passion for technical work in AI, open source and education.” Earlier sources reported that the Carpathians are considering the possibility of venture capital investment.
Karpathy’s announcement came shortly after Tesla announced it had laid off more than 200 employees. Musk has previously said he has a “bad feeling” about the state of the global economy. In an interview, he explained that about 10 percent of Telsa’s full-time employees will lose their jobs in the next three months, but the total number of people will increase within a year.
The layoffs at Tesla will primarily affect its offices in San Mateo, California, where Tesla has decided to close an office with 229 employees. Most of the workers are focused on installing the Tesla Autopilot system, which NHTSA is currently investigating in connection with 200 accidents. Tesla’s share price has fallen sharply since its peak in November 2021.
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Source: Breitbart
