Big problems?
Andrej Karpathy, the man who was responsible for autonomous driving and artificial intelligence at Tesla, is leaving Tesla. Karpathy let us know on Twitter. Tesla CEO Elon Musk thanks Karpathy for his services, but the engineer’s departure may indicate that Tesla is grappling with issues surrounding autonomous driving.
Karpathy joined Tesla in 2017 and was one of the key figures behind the Autopilot system. He was ‘Director of AI’ at the brand and in that capacity responsible for the team that is now mainly working on ‘Full Self Driving’, the system with which Teslas should eventually be able to drive completely independently. “It has been a great pleasure to help Tesla achieve its goals over the past five years,” Karpathy wrote on Twitter. “Over that span of time, Autopilot evolved from a lane assistant to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum.”
Whether the latter will succeed remains to be seen. Tesla’s Autonomous division seems to be in turmoil and a recent layoff saw 229 layoffs, a significant portion of them data analysts for the FSD project. The departure of Karpathy as one of the architects of the system is undoubtedly not encouraging. Also reports Bloomberg that Tesla in America is under the magnifying glass of the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Research has shown that Tesla’s autonomous technology has caused nearly 200 crashes. Musk said in 2020 that Teslas should be able to drive autonomously by 2021, but that ambition has not yet been realized.
Musk himself has also been a bit quieter around Full Self Driving lately. The flamboyant Tesla CEO does praise Karpathy for his services. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for Tesla! It was an honor to work with you,” Musk wrote in response to Karpathy’s tweet.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl