The head of AI at Tesla is taking a 4-month break, according to the CEO > teslamag.de

With this test delay now returning to normal, Tesla over the weekend began sending out its FSD beta software for the Autopilot system for the first electric cars in Canada. This was reported on social media by a number of selected owners, with one of them immediately noting that the FSD software cannot be used in the City of Toronto. CEO Elon Musk said she can’t get there with Tram just yet – and pointed out in the same message that a key member of the Autopilot team is temporarily unavailable for further development.

Tesla Autopilot’s face stops

Lady Karpathy is one of the few Tesla employees other than CEO Musk who regularly appears in public and is active on social media under her own name. His official title is Senior Director of AI. Together they made him the face of Tesla’s work on software for autonomous driving. Among other things, he publicly supported the Tesla boss’s course to achieve this goal by only evaluating camera images.

Karpathy is sometimes referred to as Tesla’s head of all Autopilot development, but Musk got it right last July: Technically, the software part of the system is run by three people, including the AI ​​director, he explained. . Actually, the team acts like the Knights of the Round Table, that is, without a difference in rank. The actual Autopilot boss is someone else, Musk added in December. Since that time there have also been rumors that Karpathy would leave Tesla.

Taking some time off to rest&travel after almost 5 years at Tesla. Esp excited to get focused time to re-sharpen my technical edge and train some neural nets! Though I already miss all the robots and GPU/Dojo clusters and looking forward to having them at my fingertips again ❤️😅 https://t.co/R2Yidw9Yma

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) March 27, 2022

They’re not entirely true now, but to some degree: “By the way” CEO Musk passed on information on Sunday in his Twitter message on FSD in Canada that Karpathy is currently on a sabbatical of nearly four months. After a while the AI ​​boss himself confirmed this. Karpathy wrote, he is taking time off to relax and travel after nearly five years on the job, but also to improve on technology. He looks forward to returning to all of Tesla’s robot and computer clusters later.

Fund manager saw Karpathy’s farewell in installments

Given Karpathy’s prominence, not all observers were satisfied with the announcement of relaxation. Fund manager Taylor Ogan, who had seen the AI ​​boss leave since mid-2021, felt right and interpreted the news as the first step in saying goodbye to Tesla altogether. There has indeed been such a case in the past, but not in its pure form: In August 2015, former Daimler manager Jerome Guillen took a sabbatical and returned nearly a year later as the head of the truck program at Tesla. It was only after five years that he actually left the company altogether.