Tesla's head of AI and Autopilot is leaving the company

Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's head of artificial intelligence and leader of the company's Autopilot team, is leaving the company.

Karpathy announced the departure on Twitter on Wednesday.

"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," he wrote.

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Karpathy added that he has no plans for what's next, but is looking to do pursue "technical work in AI, open source and education."

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk replied on Twitter, thanking Karpathy for his work at the company.

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The departure isn't entirely surprising, given that Karpathy took a four-month sabbatical in March, at a time when Tesla was struggling to finally launch the Full Self-Driving (FSD) set of features in its vehicles (though you could argue that Tesla has been struggling to launch FSD for years, given how behind schedule it is).

Tesla started offering FSD, which builds on top of the Autopilot set of features to offer near-autonomous driving, as limited beta in October 2020, and expanded it to a slightly wider user base in December 2021. Since then, Musk has constantly been promising a wider rollout, but it keeps getting delayed, and issues such as phantom braking and crashes of Tesla vehicles while Autopilot was engaged aren't helping.

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Karpathy's departure may, at least partially, have something to do with FSD's seemingly endless string of delays. Karpathy has overseen Autopilot software since 2017, and he has, at least publicly, been a strong proponent of Tesla's idea to ditch LiDAR and other sensors to focus its self-driving tech on cameras. This is in contrast to other companies such as Waymo and GM which rely on LiDAR for their self-driving cars.

Notably, Karpathy's departure comes after Tesla laid off 229 employees from its Autopilot team and shut down its San Mateo office.