As Tesla began rolling out its full self beta system in Canada, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the company’s AI director, deep learning expert and OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy is currently in a ~4 -month sabbatical. Karpathy confirmed the news on Twitter.
According to the AI director, he’s currently taking time off from Tesla to rest and travel, although he’s also looking forward to refocusing and sharpening his technical edge. The AI director further noted that he is looking forward to returning to his work at the electric vehicle manufacturer.
“I’m taking time off after almost 5 years at Tesla to rest and travel. I’m particularly looking forward to getting some focused time to improve my technical edge and train some neural networks! Although I’m already missing all the robots and GPU/Dojo clusters and looking forward to having them handy again,” Karpathy wrote on twitter.
While the AI director’s sabbatical may seem like worrying news to Tesla supporters given his role in the development of autopilot and full self-driving, it’s hard to deny that the Karpathy helped ignite the efforts of the… company to put autonomous driving on a potential path to success.
With Karpathy returning to Tesla after his sabbatical, several important and exciting projects await him. These include the deployment of the company’s Dojo supercomputer, which is expected to speed up Autopilot and FSD training, and the introduction of the company’s Hardware 4.0, which will be used in the Cybertruck.
Andrej Karpathy is considered one of the most distinguished experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and deep learning. While at Stanford, he designed and became the principal instructor for the university’s first deep learning class, CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition. The class grew to be one of the largest at Stanford, growing from 150 enrolled students in 2015 to 750 students in 2017.
Karpathy was also a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI, an initiative at times associated with Elon Musk. The Tesla AI Director worked on deep learning for generative models and deep reinforcement learning in OpenAI before joining Tesla as the company’s AI Director. Karpathy currently leads Tesla’s Autopilot computer vision team, which focuses on data collection and neural network training, among other things.
Taking some time off to rest and travel after almost 5 years with Tesla. Most of all, I’m looking forward to getting focused time to improve my technical edge and train some neural networks! Although I already miss all the robots and GPU/Dojo clusters and look forward to having them handy again ❤️😅 https://t.co/R2Yidw9Yma
— Andrei Karpathy (@karpathy) March 27, 2022
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Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy explains his ~4-month sabbatical
