What Former Tesla AI Director Andrej Kalpathy Is Up To These Days; Why Elon Musk Is Rooting For His Former Lieutenant

Tesla, Inc.’s TSLA former AI director, Andrej Karpathy, announced his decision to leave the company in mid-July, creating anxiety regarding a potential delay in the launch of the broader full-self driving software.

Since leaving Tesla, Karpathy has started a new YouTube channel, on which he has thus far shared four videos. The channel currently has 5,360 subscribers.

A Tesla influencer going by the Twitter handle @WholeMarsBlog shared a screenshot of one of the videos entitled “Neural Networks Backpropagation” uploaded on the channel and said, “Andrej really left Tesla to become an influencer.”

Read Benzinga's story on Tesla's upcoming AI Day and its likely impact on the stock

Tesla CEO Elon Musk quickly jumped in and suggested that the subscriber numbers have to be increased.

Tagging @Karpathy and @WholeMarsBlog, Musk said, “Got to build those YouTube subscriptions.”

Got to build those YouTube subscriptions!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 17, 2022

Musk’s Twitter followers also barged in with their own takes on the development.

“Not exactly the best career move,” one suggested.

Another said, “More like an educator influencer. An Influcator. An Edfluencer.”

Following Karpathy’s departure, Loup Ventures’ Gene Munster said he expects the FSD launch to be pushed back by a year to 2025. However, most others shrugged off the development as something Tesla should be able to handle.

Tesla closed Tuesday’s session at $910.69, down 0.89%, according to Benzinga Pro data.

Photo: Courtesy of Thomas Hawk on flickr