Tesla Ai Director Andrei Karpaty Resigns

Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence and head of the Autopilot program, Andrey Karpaty, stepped down after a four-month sabbatical.

 “It has been a great pleasure to help Tesla achieve its goals over the past five years, and it is difficult to make the decision to part ways,” the engineer said.

Karpaty did not talk about his plans for the future.

“I hope to spend more time revisiting my long-standing passions for technical work in the fields of AI, open source, and education,” he said.

Karpathy’s resignation came amid a massive downsizing at Tesla. The company previously laid off more than 200 Autopilot employees and closed its San Mateo, California office. The automaker plans to cut up to 10% of workers.

Before joining Tesla, Karpathy was a research fellow at the OpenAI deep learning program, specializing in computer vision and generative modeling.

In addition to him, Chris Rollins, senior software manager at Tesla’s energy division, and Kristen Kavanaugh, director of diversity and inclusion, left their post.

Recall that the electric car manufacturer included artificial intelligence in the company’s long-term development plan in March.