Andrej Karpathy will not be returning from his sabbatical, as he just declared on Twitter. A blow for Tesla which loses its director of artificial intelligence and leader of the team in charge of Autopilot. Additionally, other company executives are following in his footsteps and jumping ship as well.
After taking a sabbatical in March, the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, has just announced that he will not be returning to Elon Musk’s firm. Arrived at the company in June 2017 and father of autonomous driving, his departure undoubtedly comes at the worst of times, as Tesla tries to solve the problem of automated driving in the city.
A departure that hides others, unfortunately for Tesla
On his twitter accountAndrej Karpathy announced that he was leaving Tesla without indicating what he had planned for the future:
It was a great pleasure to help Tesla achieve its goals over the past 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways. During this time, Autopilot has evolved from lane-keeping to navigating city streets and I can’t wait to see the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum.
I don’t have any concrete plans for what’s next, but I’m looking to spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source, and education.
Last March, Elon Musk revealed that Andrej Karpathy was on sabbatical for four months, the director of artificial intelligence will not return. The news comes as Tesla has for a few weeks initiated a policy of downsizing which does not seem to be unanimous within the firm.
Indeed, we have learned through The Information, that other Tesla executives had wanted to leave the company. A person in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion just updated her LinkedIn profile to say that she no longer works for Tesla, and the head of solar panel and battery systems engineering has also announced his departure.
It therefore seems that there are several very important personalities at Tesla who have informed that they are leaving the ship, and their replacement will undoubtedly not be easy. In the case of Andrej Karpathy, the timing could not be worse: while the famous FSD (fully autonomous driving capability) is struggling to convince in beta version in the USA and Canada, the team in charge of the project finds itself orphan.
Andrej Karpathy however wished to reassure by declaring that the team in charge of the Autopilot is made up of hundreds of engineers who know perfectly well what they are doing. The future will tell us if Tesla manages to fulfill its objectives related to autonomous driving, which currently remain far from the repeated promises of Elon Musk. The AI Day on August 19 will undoubtedly allow us to learn more about the company’s plans for artificial intelligence.
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