Tesla Loses Key AI Executive: How Elon Musk Reacted

Tesla Inc’s TSLA senior director of artificial intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, has quit. CEO Elon Musk said it was an “honor” working with the deep learning and computer vision expert.

What Happened: Musk thanked Karpathy for his five-year stint at Tesla on Wednesday. He tweeted, “Thanks for everything you have done for Tesla! It has been an honor working with you.”

Thanks for everything you have done for Tesla! It has been an honor working with you.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2022

Karpathy said it was a “great pleasure” to help the Musk-led automaker advance towards its goals over the last half-decade. He noted that during his time Tesla’s Autopilot “graduated from lane keeping to city streets.”

“I have no concrete plans for what’s next but look to spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education,” said Karpathy on Twitter.

I have no concrete plans for what’s next but look to spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education.

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) July 13, 2022

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Why It Matters: Earlier this month, Musk said Karpathy was on a four-month sabbatical while responding to a question on Twitter.

Toronto streetcars are not yet handled well by FSD. Btw, @karpathy is on a ~4 month sabbatical.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2022

At the time, Karpathy had said he was taking some time off to “rest & travel” after his long stint at the company. He had hinted at coming back to the company.

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

Price Action: On Wednesday, Tesla shares closed 1.7% higher at $711.12 in the regular session and fell nearly 1% to $704.05 in the after-hours trading, according to Benzinga Pro data.

Benzinga's Take: The departure of Karpathy could be construed as a setback to Tesla's self-driving and AI-related efforts. There is no clarity yet on who will be replacing him or where he's headed next.

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Photo via Kaspars Grinvalds on Shutterstock