It has been reported that the senior director of AI and Autopilot leader at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, issued a statement on Wednesday saying that he is resigning from the company and will no longer be a part of it. However, the reason for his resignation has not been revealed yet, but Elon Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla, has warmheartedly thanked him for his services at the company. Karpathy was responsible for taking assessments from a team of senior machine learning scientists and engineers who used to report to him directly. However, it has to be noticed that Karpathy was on a long leave of absence for months before he actually announced his resignation yesterday.
He tweeted, “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. ” 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. “
Adhering to his strong association with artificial intelligence and the urge to make the vehicles fully automated, he spent a major portion of his expertise on achieving efficient and fully autonomous Tesla cars. But according to the statistics, around 70% of the crashes that were reported in June 2021 regarding “advanced driver assistance systems” were related to Tesla. It would surely become a major headache for the employees of the company, but authorities said that the data is not completed yet, so we can’t declare which system is the safest and which is posing a threat to the scrutiny of the company.
Coupled with this, Musk kept on promising the people the transformation of the majority of Tesla cars into fully autonomous, and in 2016, he claimed that there would be a “self-driving car that’s capable of driving from Los Angeles to New York without the need for a single touch” by the end of 2017.” Moreover, he also promised investors that “the company would have 1 million “robotaxi ready” cars on the road by the end of 2020,” and for this purpose, he collected billions of dollars from investors. To that end, accepting the delay in the deadlines, Musk said to investors, “Sometimes I am not on time, but I get it done.”
But except for providing driver assistance features like “traffic-aware cruise control, lane keeping assistance, and automated navigation,” Tesla has not yet been able to produce even a single vehicle that doesn’t require any human driver assistance and is fully autonomous. It is worth noting that Tesla’s office in San Mateo, California has now been closed after the resignation of Karpathy, as the team there directly reports to him. While Karpathy reported straight back to Elon Musk.