Energy
Friday, July 15th, 2022 3:50 pm EDT
Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy announces his departure from the company — analysts weigh in on the impact.
Originally published on Tesla Oracle.
After 5 years of leading the artificial intelligence team at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy is now leaving the company, he announced in a tweet yesterday. Andrej was one of the key executives involved in driving Tesla’s Autopilot Full Self-Driving (FSD) program ahead using cutting-edge AI.
Andrej left for a 4-month sabbatical back in March to unwind from all the hard work he had done at Tesla for the last 5 years. He was positive that he would return back to his job at Tesla at the end of his vacation. But some rumors turned out to be true, and his sabbatical ended in him leaving the automaker.
“It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways,” Andrej posted on Twitter. “In 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 further elaborated, reflecting on his contributions to Tesla’s self-driving program.
A followup tweet by Andrej clarified that he does not plan to take on another job immediately after leaving Tesla. “I have no concrete plans for what’s next,” he said.
Andrej’s Twitter and LinkedIn profile both still show him as “Director of Artificial Intelligence at Tesla.”
It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways. In that time, Autopilot 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 farewell note in response to Andrej’s tweet, “Thanks for everything you have done for Tesla! It has been an honor working with you,” he said.
Through the years, Musk has held high regard for Andrej Karpathy and his work with neural nets and deep learning. Karpathy holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, the same institution where Musk was enrolled in a PhD program for physics before dropping out to pursue his goals in the internet industry.
Last year at Tesla AI Day, Andrej Karpathy was one of the key people leading the presentation along with Elon Musk.
This year’s AI Day will be held on 19th August 2022, according to an announcement from Elon Musk in May. It will be interesting to see how the Silicon Valley Austin automaker fills the gap that Andrej has left behind, as he appears to be one of the brightest in the AI industry and deep learning 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 the past few months, FSD Beta updates have been slower than they used to be (1 or 2 updates a month). The last FSD Beta update was version 10.12, which rolled out in May.
Some analysts think that the impact on the company’s share price from Andrej leaving Tesla will be minimal since many investors don’t consider the Full Self-Driving (FSD) program a major factor when investing in Tesla (TSLA).
Let’s go over some tweets from analysts and investors to grab what they think about Andrej Karpathy’s departure from Tesla and how it will affect TSLA.
While uberbulls will downplay this, Andrej wouldn’t leave if FSD was on the verge of attaining full self-driving (L4), so I have to assume it’s not close. The good news: Most investors put little incremental value in FSD above its take rate, so $TSLA may not fall much (-1% AH).
— Gary Black (@garyblack00) July 14, 2022
I’m not sure I would expect the same rollout speed for updates with 200,000 users vs 1,000, especially as the software matures/gets better, but maybe I’m wrong. FSD Beta is way better than it used to be. 10.12 is pretty 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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