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Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's head of artificial intelligence and leader of the company's Autopilot team, announced that he is leaving the automaker. It is a big loss for Tesla's Autopilot team and a setback in their efforts to develop self-driving technology. Tesla is losing its top Autopilot executive. Karpathy worked for Elon Musk's electric vehicle venture for about five years and led its Autopilot efforts. He quickly rose through the ranks and became a big part of Tesla's Autopilot team, AI, and the automaker's effort to develop a full self-driving system.
Karpathy joined Elon Musk-run Tesla five years ago. He was on a four-month leave of absence, fuelling speculations about his return. Before joining Tesla in 2017, he was a researcher at OpenAI, the AI nonprofit backed by Musk. His departure came as Tesla laid off 229 annotation employees from its Autopilot team and closed one of its offices in the US.
He tweeted that it's been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways. During that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum. In response, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that it has been an "honor working with you".
And he added that he doesn't have concrete plans for what's next but looks to spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source, and education. We don't know who will be taking over his leadership role, but people like Ashok Elluswamy and Milan Kovac, who have both taken broader leadership roles on the software side of Autopilot in the last few years, are the likely candidates.
