Heart of the Machine Report
Editors: Du Wei, Egg Sauce
For Tesla and its AI and autonomous driving business, Andrej Karpathy's departure is tantamount to losing the backbone.
Today, Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s senior director of AI and head of autonomous driving Autopilot, announced on Twitter that he will leave the company.
In March this year, he announced that he would take a four-month leave, vaguely revealing the possibility of leaving his job. It has been observed in the past that Tesla executives who take vacations generally do not return.
He said, "In the past five years, I have been very happy to help Tesla gradually approach its goals. It is a difficult decision to leave now. I have witnessed AutoPilot from testing to deployment to city streets, and I hope that the AutoPilot team will continue its work in the future." Powerful."
As for what to do next, Karpathy said, "I have no specific plans yet, but I hope to regain my long-standing passion for AI technology work, open source and education."
Karpathy's departure seems to be "a A peaceful breakup." Tesla CEO Musk sent his blessing to Karpathy, thanked him for everything he has done for the company, and felt honored to work with him.
Academic career
From 2005 to 2009, Andrej Karpathy studied at the University of Toronto in Canada as an undergraduate, majoring in computer science and physics, and minoring in mathematics. Here, he was exposed to deep learning for the first time, listening to Hinton’s courses.
From 2009 to 2011, Karpathy studied for a master's degree at the University of British Columbia in Canada. His supervisor was Professor Michiel van de Panne of the Department of Computer Science. He mainly studied machine learning for agile robots in physical simulations.
From 2011 to 2016, Dr. Karpathy studied at Stanford University and studied under the famous AI scholar Li Feifei . He focused on the research of convolutional/ recurrent neural networks and their applications in computer vision , natural language processing and cross-fields. . During this period, he designed and served as the main instructor of Stanford's first deep learning course "CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks and Visual Recognition".
Meanwhile, Karpathy has three more internships. In 2011, he entered and Google Brain as an intern at the early stage of development, focusing on large-scale unsupervised learning in the video field. Later in 2013, he interned at Google Research again, working on large-scale supervised learning of YouTube videos. In 2015, he interned at DeepMind and participated in the deep reinforcement learning team.
Currently, on Google Scholar, Karpathy’s paper has been cited 47911 times. Among them, his paper "Large-scale Video Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks", the second most cited and his first author, was included in CVPR 2014 Oral.
At Tesla for five years
Karpathy is a founding member and research scientist of OpenAI. Just over a year later, in 2017, Karpathy accepted Musk's invitation to join Tesla, replacing Chris Lattner, then head of Tesla Autopilot and the father of the Apple Swift language and LLVM compiler.
Chris Lattner only worked at Tesla for six months, and when he left Tesla's self-driving software research department, he said: "It turns out that Tesla is not suitable for me at all."
In five years, Karpathy single-handedly promoted The development of Autopilot, although the autonomous driving system has been controversial. Just last month, U.S. authorities stepped up their investigation into whether the technology was flawed, revealing they had reviewed nearly 200 crashes involving vehicles using Autopilot.
As Tesla slowly expanded from the initial autonomous driving to the broader field of artificial intelligence, Karpathy was also promoted to Tesla's senior director of AI, reporting directly to Musk.
The technology developed by Karpathy's team is crucial to Tesla's full autonomous driving system FSD, and is also the main selling point of Musk's promotion of Model S, Cybertruck and other models. The FSD surcharge is $12,000 per vehicle.
Karpathy’s departure comes on the heels of more than 200 layoffs in the Autopilot department. Just two days ago, a California regulatory filing revealed that Tesla will permanently close its San Mateo, California office and lay off 229 data annotation employees.
Tesla shares fell 0.5% in late trading on Wednesday and had fallen 33% by the close. In June, Musk announced the start of global layoffs. The stock price fell by more than 9% and the market value evaporated by more than $67 billion. Throughout the first half of 2022, Tesla's stock price has fallen by more than 40%.
A year ago, Musk said that Autopilot was jointly responsible for Ashok Elluswamy and Milan Kovac, which he called a "round table structure." So, as to who will be Karpathy's successor, both Ashok Elluswamy and Milan Kovac are possible candidates.
Reference content:
https://karpathy.ai/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrej-karpathy-9a650716/
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/13/23211358/ tesla- head-of-ai-andrej-karpathy
