Former Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy has said he is rejoining ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which Elon Musk co-founded in 2015. “Like many others both in/out of AI, I am very inspired by the impact of their work, and I have personally benefited greatly from it,” he said. Karpathy joined Tesla in 2017 after having worked at Open AI.
In 2022, Tesla’s head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, and a prominent leader in the development of Autopilot, its driver assist feature, which requires supervision by a human, announced on Twitter that he’s resigning from the automaker giant.
In his tweet last year, Karpathy wrote, “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.” In a follow-up tweet, Karpathy further said he has “no concrete plans for what’s next” but wants to revisit “my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education.”
The resignation seems cordial, as CEO Elon Musk replied kindly to Karpathy on Twitter. According to Bloomberg, in March, Karpathy mentioned that he was on a sabbatical to “rest & travel” but had said he planned to come back to Tesla this month onwards.
Karpathy was hired by Musk-led Tesla in 2017, taking over the top AI job after former Apple executive Chris Lattner’s six-month term in the post. Being an AI chief, Karpathy has overseen the growth and development of Tesla’s controversial Autopilot driver assist software. However, the federal government currently probed the software after Tesla’s using Autopilot crashed into parked emergency vehicles.
Karpathy’s resignation follows layoffs of around 200 Tesla employees focused on Autopilot.
Tesla has slacked off around 200 workers, most associated with labelling to help direct the company’s Autopilot AI system. The layoffs — which Bloomberg initially reported are the most recent job losses at Tesla since chief Elon Musk informed company executives that the automaker needed to downsize its workforce by about 10 per cent.
Centred on Tesla’s offices in San Mateo, California, where employees were working on the company’s driver-assistance feature Autopilot, the layoffs majorly impacted. It has been reported that hourly workers were tasked with labelling training data. This work is paramount for enhancing AI systems but is often low-skilled and poorly paid. Recently, several companies have moved to cheaper sources of labour in developing countries to get this done.
