Andrej Karpathy, a well-known person at Tesla who played a key role in improving the company’s computerised reasoning and driver assistance technology, said on Wednesday that he is leaving the company.
Karpathy’s departure, for which he didn’t give a good reason, comes at a crucial time as Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, tries to achieve his goal of full self-driving capability this year after missing it a few times in the past.
In a note to investors, Credit Suisse examiner Dan Levy said that Karpathy’s takeoff “possibly shows that Tesla is having trouble making progress in FSD/robotaxi.”
“We keep looking at Tesla’s efforts in autonomous vehicles and robot taxis and saying, ‘Show me.'”
Parts of Tesla fell 1% in long-term exchange to reach $704.
Karpathy, whose job title was “ranking executive of AI,” was let go after Tesla announced on Tuesday that it was closing its office in San Mateo, California, and laying off more than 200 people there. This office was part of the group that worked on “Autopilot,” driver assistance technology.
Karpathy, who worked at the company’s Palo Alto office, was in charge of the PC vision team for Tesla Autopilot. He led efforts to develop AI technology using data from Tesla cars on the road.
“It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla achieve its goals over the past few years, and it’s been hard to decide to go in a different direction,” Karpathy wrote on Twitter, adding that he doesn’t know what he will do right away.
In a tweet, Musk replied: “Thank you for everything you’ve done for Tesla! It’s been a pleasure to work with you.”
During Karpathy’s residency, Tesla’s driver right-hand technology made a lot of progress, but it didn’t live up to Musk’s promises. Musk said in 2019 that Tesla would send out driverless taxis by 2020.
“I would think that Karpathy’s job will be filled by a promotion from within. Raj Rajkumar, who teaches electrical and PC design at Carnegie Mellon University, said, “It would be hard to find someone remotely with Karpathy’s knowledge and insight.”
Musk said in a January webcast interview that Karpathy played a big role, but he also said, “People will give me a lot of credit, and they’ll give Andrej too much credit.”
Karpathy said at the end of March that he needed a four-month break to “re-hone my specialised edge.”
He’s not the first Tesla boss to leave after taking some time off. Doug Field, who was in charge of design at the time, joined Apple (AAPL.O) in 2018 after taking some much-needed time off to “re-energize.” He is with Ford right now (F.N).
All in all, Karpathy’s flight was too much for a few groups. A former coworker at Autopilot told Reuters, “He works as obsessively as Elon.”
The Autopilot feature from Tesla is being looked into by the government. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into a series of accidents, some of which may have been caused by Tesla cars working in Autopilot mode.
