The 35-year-old has been with Tesla since 2017 and is responsible, among other things, for the in-house autopilot to recognize its surroundings.
(Photo: San Francisco Chronicle via Gett)
new York Elon Musk is currently under fire in the US press every day, mainly because of the drama surrounding the Twitter takeover that was first announced and then canceled again. The head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla actually has more pressing problems.
On Thursday night, Andrej Karpathy, one of the most important experts behind Tesla’s driver assistance system, announced that he was leaving the company. That’s not good news for Musk: The billionaire has been promising the full launch of in-house autopilot “this year” for years – which, among other announcements, is intended to justify Tesla’s high valuation. Karpathy’s departure raises doubts about this again.
Karpathy explained that he wanted to spend more time on technical work related to the development of artificial intelligence (AI). The 35-year-old has been with Tesla since 2017 and is responsible, among other things, for the in-house autopilot to recognize its surroundings. To date, the system has been unreliable.
Karpathy has already completed a four-month sabbatical. His departure follows the closure of Tesla’s San Mateo, California, office, where 229 employees charged with improving autopilot by manually identifying image content were laid off in a recent job cut, CNBC reported. Karpathy, officially “Senior Director of AI” at Tesla, worked in the former corporate headquarters in Palo Alto.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
After positions at Google and a doctorate at Stanford, he worked for the AI start-up OpenAI, which Musk co-founded, from 2016 before moving to Tesla in 2017. “It has been my great pleasure to help Tesla achieve its goals over the past five years,” Karpathy wrote. “During that time, Autopilot has evolved from a lane departure warning system to a system for inner-city roads.” Musk thanked Karpathy on Twitter.
The departure follows a long line of reshuffles at the helm of the Autopilot team, which is struggling to achieve Musk’s ambitions.
Tesla relies on a special approach to autonomous driving, which, unlike the competition, only gets by with cameras. Their images are evaluated and interpreted by AI – analogous to a human driver who can only rely on his eyes. Musk believes in the approach and rejects the installation of additional systems, such as radar or laser sensors. However, experts consider this to be dangerous. The US supervisors are also becoming increasingly critical.
According to US regulator figures released in June, Tesla vehicles have been responsible for nearly 70 percent of reported crashes involving advanced driver assistance systems since June 2021. However, regulators pointed out that the data was incomplete.
More: Elon Musk: New Tesla plants in Grünheide and Texas “burn billions of dollars”