Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy announces his departure from the company – analysts weigh the impact.
Originally published on Tesla Oracle.
After 5 years leading the artificial intelligence team at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy is now leaving the company, he tweeted yesterday. Andrej was one of the key executives involved in driving Tesla’s Autopilot Full Self-Driving (FSD) program using advanced AI.
Andrej left in March for a 4-month sabbatical to relax from all the hard work he had put in over the past 5 years at Tesla. He was sure he would return to his job at Tesla at the end of his vacation. But some rumors turned out to be true, and his sabbatical ended with him leaving the automaker.
“It has been a great pleasure to help Tesla achieve its goals for the past 5 years and it was a difficult decision to break up,” Andrej wrote on Twitter. “At that time, Autopilot graduated from lane-keeping to city streets, and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum,” he continued on his contributions to Tesla’s self-driving program.
A follow-up tweet from Andrej clarified that he has no plans to take another job immediately after leaving Tesla. “I have no concrete plans for what’s next,” he said.
Andrej’s Twitter en LinkedIn profile both still show him as ‘Director of Artificial Intelligence at Tesla’.
It has been a great pleasure to help Tesla achieve its goals for the past 5 years and it was a difficult decision to break up. In that time, Autopilot has graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum.
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) July 13, 2022
Tesla CEO Elon Musk also wrote a suicide note in response to Andrej’s tweet: “Thank you for everything you’ve done for Tesla! It was an honor to work with you,” he said.
Over the years, Musk has been deeply appreciative of Andrej Karpathy and his work with neural networks and deep learning. Karpathy has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, the same institution where Musk was enrolled in a physics PhD program before dropping out to pursue his goals in the Internet industry.
last year at Tesla AI DayAndrej Karpathy was one of the key people leading the presentation, along with Elon Musk.
This year’s AI Day will be held on August 19, 2022, according to an announcement from Elon Musk in May. It will be interesting to see how the Silicone Valley Austin automaker is filling the gap left by Andrej as he appears to be one of the brightest in the AI and deep learning industry today.
Tesla AI Day #2 on Aug 19 So many cool updates!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2022
The impact of Andrej Karpathy leaving Tesla
In recent months, FSD Beta updates have been slower than before (1 or 2 updates per month). The last FSD Beta update was: version 10.12which was rolled out in May.
Some analysts believe the impact of Andrej’s departure on the company’s stock price will be minimal, as many investors do not view the Full Self-Driving (FSD) program as a major factor when investing in Tesla (TSLA).
Let’s go through some tweets from analysts and investors to understand what they think of Andrej Karpathy’s departure from Tesla and how it will affect TSLA.
While uberbulls will downplay this, Andrej wouldn’t leave if FSD were on the cusp of going fully self-driving (L4), so I have to assume it won’t come close. The good news: most investors put little incremental value in FSD above the take rate, so $TSLA should not fall much (-1% AH).
— Gary Black (@garyblack00) July 14, 2022
I’m not sure I would expect the same rollout rate for updates with 200,000 users vs 1,000, especially as the software matures/improves, but I might be wrong. FSD Beta is much better than it used to be. 10.12 is damn good. Still needs a lot of work, but it’s good.
1/3
— Sawyer Merritt 📈🚀 (@SawyerMerritt) July 14, 2022
Featured Image: Screenshot from Tesla event video
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