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Director of AI at Tesla, leading the Autopilot Vision team leaves Tesla
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@elonmusk: Thanks for everything you have done for Tesla! It has been an honor working with you.
———-
For those out of the loop, Andrej Karpathy has been on a sabbatical for the last 4 months. Thanks for everything Andrej!
MFers act like they forgot about Drej
Also his last name being Karpathy is pretty funny considering his career focus
How will my Tesla Kar find a Pathy now?
Nominal determinism in action.
Not surprised at all. People who usually take sabbaticals end up leaving the company due to a change in personality/vision/goals.
My tech lead is on a 6-month sabbatical and I fully expect them to leave after they "come back". They've already left the company, they just haven't realised it yet.
Yeah I was hoping this wouldn’t be the case, but deep down I knew there was at least a 30-50% chance.
I’ve seen it go both ways in my time at tech. Some people really are devoted to the work, but are just deeply burned out and need a lengthy “reset”. But then they come back as full steam as ever.
Others, no, either their interests/priorities shifted, or they’ve made enough money and realized it, or a particular traumatic burnout might have scarred their mental health to the point that they never bounce back to normal…. And during their hiatus that’s when they make this realization.
There’s something profoundly blinding about being stuck in a daily routine doing the same thing over and over again. It’s why casinos are arranged without 90 degree turns, etc etc etc.
(Source: Tech worker, former tech manager, avid gambler, seen all of these things happen? :D )
Can confirm, tons of people are simply on 'autopilot' - and don't really make decisions in their lives. It's all too easy to become stuck
Tech here. Gambler as well.
Oh.
Haha I wonder if this a pattern….
Heh.
Fuck.
Tech as well...hate casinos.
Stock market however? Shit
We all have our own form of gambling disguised as something else!
Not surprised but disappointing to given the FSD timeline
I'm sure this is the most common practice, but I'll say my brother in law is about to take his second sabbatical at his company and he loves it. There's no question he's going back
What are the laws/rules for sabbaticals at most companies? Do you get paid while you're away? Can anyone just decide they're going on sabbatical and they have to let you?
The secret is when you are important to the company there are no rules.
But for peons typically you have the right to take a sabbatical for a certain length of time for every X years of service. Like after working somewhere for 5 years you get a 1 month sabbatical.
Typically it's paid.
Hmm and it's considered different than vacation/PTO time?
Correct.
The point of a sabbatical is forced continuous time off to prevent burnout.
Intel is famous for sabbaticals and they get 1 month every 4 weeks of service.
Edit 1 month for every 4 years
personally I don't think I could stay at a company for 5 years
My company did have a sabbatical program that they implemented a year after I started there. It was 6 weeks paid after 7 years dads of service. They stopped it when I was on year 7 because no one was using it. I was planning to use it.
Instead we get $500 after 5 hours years and $1,000 after 10. I would rather have had the paid time off.
Usually that’s because they go to quit, but the company says. Just take a break. Think it over. No need to make rash decisions. The sabbatical ends and they go “yeah the sample of not working for you was great. I’d like more of that”.
That’s my plan. I’m contractually obligated to give my employer 6 months notice to quit. I’ll be taking a 6 month “sabbatical” at that time lol
I'm so confused. So you can just say you don't want to work for 6 months and your company is cool with it?
When I put in my 6 months I’ll be put on gardening leave. Basically be told my services are not required, but I’ll be expected to be available.
Usually cause they’re waiting for the next vesting period.
Yep. And if you are ever burnt out and have the capability to take a 6 month sabbatical, do it. I did it like 5 years ago and it changed my life for the better.
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I guess operation vacation was totally successful.
Dudes only worked for 6 years total out of school, he’s gonna change the world wherever he goes - it’s good that he’ll potentially bring AI into other industries - especially education
I don't think he necessarily meant applying AI to education, more like teaching people ABOUT AI... He is the guy that taught CS231n at Stanford for a while and actually designed the whole course after all...
Yikes, if there was one guy who could lead the solution to a very tough computer vision problem, it was Andrej. Wonder who will try to fill his shoes.
Dude is absolutely brilliant.
Indeed, even his last name. He was born to write the software for telling vehicles where to go.
😂 hilarious, never thought of that
Hahah hadn’t considered that! You’re right
that’s hilarious!
just for the information, he is named after mountain range near his birthplaces, Carpathian mountains, which spans through Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine and Romania. In Slovak, it is calf Karpaty
This is a phenomenon called nominative determinism
Growing up, we had elementary school teacher named Mrs. Hooker, so gratefully this is just a tendency to gravitate towards an area of work.
Thanks for all your work. 👍
Wish Elon had paid 44B to finish FSD instead of messing around with a stupid social media app
I think Elon’s Twitter decisions are a great insight into his decision making process. Wake up one morning and decide to buy Twitter and then wake up the next morning realizing wtf he did.
Now apply this pushing the team - against their wishes - to vision only.
More likely that he was talked into it by other eccentric billionaires -- Jack Dorsey, and Elon's foreign-born MAGA-billionaire buddies from PayPal - David Sacks and Peter Theil (who recently just quit the Facebook board to focus on getting MAGA-types elected in 2022 and 2024).
But I agree he has long-standing problems identifying and listening to actual experts -- when covid hit high-tech companies like Google/FB/Microsoft listened to virology experts and protected their human assets. Elon retweet right-wing nonsense and also predicted it would hit zero cases by April 2020.
Don't forget his trans daughter who he was undoubtedly regularly fighting with about her gender and probably was blaming The Woke Mind Virus for corrupting his child.
"You're not Trans! You've just been corrupted by leftist nonsense! I'm going to buy Twitter and put an end to this garbage filling your head!"
Elon/Tesla hired a trans "hacker princess" away from Apple 8 years ago
https://cleantechnica.com/2014/02/18/tesla-motors-snags-kristin-paget-apple/
but much more recently has been shit-posting things disparaging trans people. My sense was that it was more that his kid was fed up with him, not that he has any concern about what one of his many children are doing.
and also getting cheered by his minions on twitter.
Absolutely ego being a part of it for sure. Again, same ego that says 2 eyes so why not just 8 cameras.
I want to make clear I respect Mr. Musk. Most people are amazing if they create one revolutionary company. Jobs did Apple and Pixar. Musk did PayPal and then risked it all on Tesla and Space X. And created two of the most amazing companies out there.
But ego and genius can sometimes take you down the wrong path as well.
Remember when he wanted a fully carbon fibre roadster.
Or just making insane promises about autopilot that the team absolutely knew it could not deliver in the time frame he suggested
YEP. Vision only was an incredibly bad decision. Many of us have received broken cars. Autopilot is a NIGHTMARE because of this and Tesla knows it. Phantom braking is so painful, and dangerous. Just took a trip from Austin to Cali and back and had to stop using it as it was horrible. Spoke to many other drivers at charging stations and they were like "omfg it's a disaster". One guy said his children were tossed against the back seats because of it.
Musk is a dangerous loose cannon.
Yes because you can just throw money at it. That's why everyone else solved it.
Yeah, I’d love to say money could solve problems but this is not grounded in any science. We’d have otherwise solved cancer along time ago. It’s a hard engineering problem that will only be solved by experimentation, new research, and waiting for better hardware to come along.
So throwing 44B at twitter is better? 44B to another EV/battery factory, lithium mining, rockets, boring tunnels, heck even neuralink...heck even to help pay for all the Elon babies out there might be better.
Starting to think Tesla should jettison the CEO
In this entire chain of discussion, mostly veered to the iPhone, no one has mention what Elon the person is doing to electrification. Tesla is 70%+ the market share in the US, an EV is Tesla, Elon is Tesla, in the American mind Elon is EV.
Many times I have talked to people in person and they say something to the effect. “I don’t want an electric car, Elon is an asshole”. Further proof of this is the comments of any Reddit post with Tesla in the title.
Elon has become more of a distraction than an asset, and a self-punching bag for the merchants of doubt.
Maybe splitting of FSD into its own company might not be a bad idea. Personally i feel like 30-50% of TSLA valuation is the potential of FSD.
Without question - he has skills and knowledge, no question, but he's a terrible CEO and leader.
Sorry I have no gold, my brokerage account is leaking.
You can't have 9 women birth a baby in 1 month. Same thing with FSD, throwing money and more people won't make it happen sooner. In fact, having too many people and thus bureaucracy will make it slower.
Ah the good ol' mythical man month.
In case anyone thought FSD was close… this is a pretty good data point that it’s not close at all. If it was close you’d think Andrej would stay to see it through.
Coming in 2017 don’t worry
Don’t be silly, there’s no possible way it’ll be ready by 2017. It’s gonna be late 2018 at the earliest.
I still remember being downvoted to oblivion for merely arguing that Tesla wouldn’t achieve level 5 self driving within a year in 2017-2018.
Mind you, this was in response to the Model 3 not having an instrument cluster and that it was pointless because no one would ever use the steering wheel.
This is exactly why you don’t buy FSD. You won’t get it at any point during the life of these cars.
I wouldn't buy it now, but at $6k it maybe was a good investment IF they honor it and retrofit any and all improved hardware to make it work.
The issue is if they start delineating FSD versions and don't retrofit.
The day they announce that, there will be lawsuits.
LOL. "investment."
Also, LOL at retrofits. All they sell today as a feature of "FSD" is City Streets Autosteer. FSD Beta is that and is all they owe anyone with a current car.
They had much more significant promises on the order page for FSD years ago when it was a cheaper option. I believe this is what could trigger lawsuits.
For example, it actually said "All you will need to do is get in and tell your care where to go. If you don't say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigate urban streets (even without lane markings), manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and roundabouts, and handle densely packed freeways with cars moving at high speed. When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you."
City Streets Autosteer is a good portion of that promise, assuming they get it working well enough, but there are a few additional features promised in there that will take a huge amount of work to deliver. I doubt anyone is working on an improved summon mode right now.
I’ve heard the current cameras don’t cut it. Doubt they’ll be retrofitting those.
Currently if you bought FSD with the 3.0 hardware (so basically any car built within the last 3-4 years), they will retrofit with the new computer.
That said, if you bought FSD, you do have features that others don't. You have navigate on autopilot, automatic lane changing, etc. Additionally, more and more people are getting access to the beta. I'm sure a lot of this is to avoid lawsuits in the future. People did get something for their money.
It feels like Tesla has FSD at about 98%, but they need to be at 99.999%. At this point it comes down to iteration, and test data. My personal opinion is that it will take a year to get each nine. We're still four years away from FSD being totally hands off driving. If something happens and Tesla is not allowed to run the public beta, it will push this back a decade.
I think Tesla made a mistake when they didn't set it up so that FSD was locked to the owner, not the car. I'm 3 1/2 years into ownership, and I really don't think I'll get another Tesla when I decide to move on. If I had FSD "attached" to me, I probably would have. I probably won't have my car for another 4-5 years though.
To be honest, I see this as Tesla not being able to fulfill their promise. And Karpathy not wanting to be responsible for it.
Yeah, I mean obviously you never know for sure. But based on my own experience with the beta (in CA) FSD is definitely not on track to regularly have zero-disengagement drives anytime in the next year. Seems like at this point it will be at least two years before that happens, probably three more before it will operate without driver attention in limited scenarios, probably 6-8 years before it will be operating without a driver present in most conditions.
its not the just the time needed. The current sensors and approach they are using isn't enough IMO.
Sensors are fine. It’s driving logic which is stupid. In my experience with FSD beta I’ve seen very limited times when it was recognition fault. Usually the scene is rendered perfectly, but car just makes stupid decisions nevertheless.
there are plenty of videos showing how the AI fails to recognize clear lane lines, is fooled by signs painted on buses etc.
The position they have that vision is enough is not agreed upon by anyone else in the industry who are much bigger AI experts, that should tell you something. Also Tesla fans love to repeat 'other sensors will confuse the system' which is nonsense as everyone else has sensor fusion working.
That’s what I’ve been saying for a while now! Completely agree. Tesla’s issue isn’t vision related anymore, on screen you can see that FSD beta is rendering everything in the environment perfectly, the piece that’s severely lacking is the code base that tells the car what to do with that information. The main problems I’ve been having are the lane choices and extreme hesitancy around pedestrians. The only other area that I can think of for improving from an AI perspective is a persistent memory base for various objects that are temporarily occluded from view (car passing behind a truck in the next lane over completely vanishes until the cameras can detect it again). Not entirely sure if this last point is being worked already and the visualizations for FSD currently only depict what the cameras see, but I’ve often felt like it has issues predicting the pathing of occluded cars.
I don’t know if anyone seriously thought it was “close”. I have a FSD Beta car and a radar EAP HW3 car, and just having the FSD Beta car drive the same roads as the EAP car with the same degree of confidence/correctness hasn’t happened in over 6 months of tracking them side by side.
I admire all the progress that FSD Beta is making, but maybe they’re close to a tightly geofenced “L2 ADAS for city driving” release (close being the next year maybe), but they’re really far from a generalized L2 ADAS or any higher level of autonomy, to be honest. That’s not discounting how much work they’ve done. It’s a really hard problem and I really feel Elon is trivializing the long tail that makes or breaks any complex engineering project.
"The last 10% of a project takes 90% of the time."
- True of almost any project
"We're improving exponentially!"
- Elon Musk about everything
I think we need to start having serious talks about what a class action FSD lawsuit looks like. I agree as both a user and an observer that is not close. Many of us purchased the option years ago and likely won't see it working on our cars during their regular lifecycles.
That or Operation Vacation was a success.
Too many people on here are way too optimistic. Use FSD beta for a day and your optimism will go straight out the window.
No one who works in ai thinks Vision only self driving is close
No one thinks any non geo fenced self driving is close
No one thinks Tesla can do anything approximating full self driving on their current hardware stack
Full self driving on most American roads is achievable in maybe 3-5 years though on a future hardware platform…
Anybody with FSD Beta that doesn’t have a YT channel knows it’s not even remotely close & know it could be impossible with current hardware.
He must not enjoy going back to the office
Remote work is so incredibly liberating
Worked remotely since 2014. Would be sooooo hard to go back to an office.
HA! That might very well be the REAL reason, no jokes. Remember how Apple’s head of AI resigned a couple of months ago over the same exact reason! Unique experts will be able to find a place on conditions they set for sure.
Noooooooo. He was awesome on the tesla team but i know there are other awesome hungry engineers ready to step up to the challenge
Do you work there
I mean Ashok runs the AP/FSD team. Has been doing all the presentations and such for Tesla AI and such days.
Yeah, with Andrej gone it’s mainly him at the helm. But Andrej was a well known, experienced and well respected person in the field—lots of presentations, blog posts, classes he taught and so forth. It’s a huge loss to see someone like him leave. Generally people in his leadership position are not involved in day to day operations, but they bring direction and wisdom that’s super important especially for challenging things like AI.
Seems like Andrej preferred the education and open aspects of what he does. It's possible that others are just as qualified and capable, but do not get involved in outreach as much as Andrej, thus leading to outsiders underestimating their capabilities.
Five years of trying to crack one of the hardest nuts in all of tech, while working for one also.
ha!
Thank you Andrej for saving my 12k USD
Oh, this isn't just some guy.
So, I assume I'm not going to get my paid FSD release anytime soon...
Any day now our cars will turn into robotaxis and start earning money for us!
Certainly not within the lifespan of the car your FSD purchase is attached to. But if you're lucky Tesla will give a few extra bucks for it when you trade in!
I want a one-time full transfer of my paid FSD to a new Tesla. The MX is 5 years old now, not even in the beta.
You and me both buddy. Crickets from Tesla.
Called it (along with many others) when he took his sabbatical…
Also anyone recall this tweet?
But, I'm sure FSD will still be done by the end of the year. The director of the project for half a decade wouldn't leave months before their moment of triumph.... /s
It's pretty clear the sabbatical was at best an effort to recharge before another multi-year push. Looks like another 5 years of Sisyphean labor just wasn't appealing. You can't live your life in eternal crunch for years on end.
Wow - definitely a loss for the team but given that he was comfortable taking a long work sabbatical earlier this year it seems like he is fully confident that the team can go on without him. Wish him well and looking forward to whatever he does next!
Damn, I really thought it was going to be a break before he comes back to dive in really hard to make it all work. Kind of crazy to leave a project like this at this stage.
Rereading his tweet, it seems like he was more a manager/lead in setting the technical vision rather than day to day implementation. It's the typical route for ICs to move away from technical work to climb the ladder but then miss it and go back to being a IC
Ain't that the truth.
I've been promoted to paperwork at my office and I really miss problem solving
Let’s put it this way, he would not be leaving if TSLA is as close as they claim. Devastating news
I blame Chuck and his UPLs. He convinced Andre that a hardware upgrade is needed with at least a camera up front.
I absolutely think a camera up front is necessary, the car doesn't have the perspective to see around residential corners with cars parked up to the edges.
Based on the massive slowdown on fsd I have to wonder if its a coincidence
It's possible they did hit a brick wall and new guy is leading some re-architecting.
Not unusual, it's happened before.
We all forget that before Andrej stepped in the architecture was much different and he led a large restructuring of the code.
Perhaps.
From recent Elon interviews- part of the issue is the neural nets on each camera aren't synchronous, so cams will feed estimated point data at different times. Result is they don't have a single combined point cloud / 3d model of the world around the car that has all inconsistencies resolved and ready for the driving AI.
That to me seems the biggest current challenge. I suspect a lot of the phantom braking comes from that, and it's why phantom brake things don't show up on the situation display.
I also suspect Elon is right about radar feeding bad data, but more in the line of it feeds you data that makes you lazy and you lean on it. I suspect with radar/lidar operating only to validate the model generated by machine vision, the result would be much better overall because you solve the 'hard' problem and use the 'easy' data to check your solution.
To be honest, I think the radar is a combination of things:
Used as a scapegoat for the new guy blaming the old guy
Legitimate issues in the OEM vendor's algorithms
I've always said (and I said 3 years ago) Tesla still needs radar but needs to make an ESA radar so it can scan the entire field of view in one instant. And do all the algorithms in house so they aren't depended on someone else's interpretation of the data.
There's an old adage in information theory: When decisions are made information is lost.
The issue with the current radar is that there are underlying algorithms the reduce the returned power into detected radar returns (also the wide beamwidth). I think they'll feed the raw (or some reduced form) of the radar returns through its own neural net and let it find the patterns in the data itself.
I fully believe radar will come back with HW4. It will be mandatory. No way a Level 4/5 driving system gets certified without a fully orthogonal sensor for emergency/safety and ESA RADAR provides that.
Disclaimer: I have 8 years of experience in Classical Computer vision for navigation applications with published papers on multi-sensor fusion for navigation and 4 years of experience in RADAR for aircraft weather radar. But I haven't worked in that area in a few years (I wish I never left).
What I’ve always wondered is that if going vision only was the best route all along. Other guys seem to be going with best of both worlds or triple checking with LiDAR, radar and cameras.
They removed radar from their newer Tesla’s and the older ones had it disabled via software so there is no way to validate any vision data. It’s just purely vision now.
You know what solves delays in overlaping cameras? Using a 360 LiDAR...
Naah, he just wanted to leave right away, and Elon was like “Dude, calm down, take a break”. Didn’t work out, obviously.
Goodbye Andrej, hello…… TeslaBot.
Tesla and LaMDA have combined their powers to realise TeslaBot aka Optimus.
First task… vacuum Level 1. Second task…. Navigate and vacuum stairs. Third task…
/s
I think this is really bad news. As I understand from multiple sources, including some statements by Elon, Elon forced this vision only approach on the autopilot team not because the team complained about radar noise or was not making progress, but because of Elon had a core belief that all you need is vision. And as we see with the whole Twitter mess, Elon can make some impulsive decisions.
As you read various sources, this decision was fought by the autopilot team. In Elon’s interview (you can see it on YouTube) with the Silicon Valley Tesla Club, he, again, says as much.
I think the program is in trouble. I believe that the current hardware suite will not get Tesla to anything approaching level 4/5 and my in most instances struggle with level 3. Perhaps they can get to level three on divided highways, but that’s going to be the extent of it.
I had my new S in Florida and it did ok on most roads with the beta. I brought it to Manhattan for the summer and it’s a joke. It quite literally cannot perform basic maneuvers in one of the easiest places to drive. Traffic lights on every corner in a grid setup. The issue here is the sheer number of pedestrians make FSD so skittish as to be worthless.
We will see if I am right, but I believe Tesla will move back to a radar - a much more advanced radar with LiDAR like capabilities - combined with the cameras.
Not shocking that updates are now coming so slowly.
FSD is not a year away; it may well be a decade away. I hope I’m wrong.
I've been saying that since 2016. The whole industry actually always knew the approach Tesla took is possible in theory, but impossible to implement within a decade. Engineers at Waymo knew, engineers at Cruise knew, hell, even engineers at Tesla knew.
Solving localization with camera is just extremely difficult, and the accuracy is just simply not going to be sufficient for any FSD heuristics in existence.
People on this sub didn't want to hear that and we'd much rather make fun of Waymo or Cruise or anyone else and people want to believe that Elon Musk is real life Tony Stark with a magical bullet solution that's just more brilliant than the rest of the industry combined.
Turned out Tony Stark is a comic book character and doesn't exist in real life.
One hundred percent agree. FSD is in trouble. You wouldn't chop the head of a department or the specialist in that department without some succession plan.
Kaparthy would have introduced his successor and reinstated the mission of this was all going to plan.
I’m wondering when the class action lawsuit(s) will begin. I hope that the people who paid for FSD can get at least part of their money back if it plays out that they’ll never get what they paid for.
Tesla makes everyone sign an arbitration agreement at purchase and gives you 30 days to send them a physical letter - from when your VIN is assigned to opt out of the arbitration. I opted out, but I suspect I am in a very small number. And the arbitration clause prevents you from being part of the class. Tesla thought about this.
Spoken like some one who knows whats is what inside tesla beyond the elon smoke shield. The reality is they the AI and AP team want a back up way to know rate and range of moving objects and they want to drive it with eyes. elons hubris is catching up with him with regards to the no radar eyes only model. These moves have no cost him one of the most talented and well admired leaders in his company. Elon will speak kindly of him but does not regard it as the loss it truly is for his company. Tesla would be vastly better off if elon went and just played with his big rocket and twitter and cruised by every so often to rally the troops. This forced choice of vission only was one of economic requirement when radars stopped shipping, and became a see i told you so. The reality the team is not looking for level 3 they want level 5 and they want it certified, and they damn well mean it. The reason you saw that come up to the FCC was casue the team worked at it pushed for it, just like they have pushed for new camera and new CPU for all cars. Elon has just not been wanting to hear it. So we get more extended time lines and more smoke and more mirrors. I truly deep down believe the team is on the gold pay, and that given less bs Elonisms would churn out a system cheaper faster and smarter than the entire AI compition. Elon is once again screwing it up….. Like dude we get it you are cool and all but at some point let the AI nerds work and when they tell you what they need listen
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Elon AI day 2: “Turns out there are a trillion special case scenarios that aren’t covered by our rules. But we’re working on it. “
I’m not happy about it, but it’s been a possibility since his sabbatical since he’s not been there the last 4 months. He built a fantastic foundation with FSD Beta and we know Tesla has a killer AI team and the best real world datasets. It sucks, but I’m not worried since they have the data and the proper foundation now.
That’s why I read since at least 2017. When will we see it implemented?
Operation Vacation completed successfully?
Anyone else notice the FSD beta releases slowed from a two week schedule to a six week schedule around the time he took his sabbatical?
Another automaker is going to make this guy an offer he can’t refuse.
Comma AI 👀
Are you kidding they can't afford him. This is more like mobile eye, Mercedes, Rivian that kind of thing
Nvidia🤞
That would be pretty cool actually. Especially given the relationship between mobileye and Nvidia
Usually in software development people come and go often, we learned the hard way in the last two years. But if you are the leader of a team, you are in the middle of a beta project for a huge project for your company, is not only about money or other small things. You want to be there for taking merit and seeing the results if this project is really at a good stage.
Clearly there has been a clash with Musk, something really common by looking around. The n-th blond push to do something, to do more, to do better. And the dude looked around and said... You know what? Build this fucking software yourself if you are so smart.
Sad to see this, and happy I did not buy FSD.
So he can't just leave after 5 years because he wants to do something else and working at Tesla is really stressful? The same was the case with Jerome... In your guys views there's absolutely no time when someone can leave the company without it beeing a bad sign for someone...
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Lol... He was there for 5 years... You don't stay at a company for 5 years if you get like 10 good competing offers a day unless you don't hate your boss...
His leaving could be owed to one of two reasons. Either he had a falling out with Elon over something or other, or he doesn't think Tesla's approach to FSD is feasible anymore. That he simply wants to work on something else doesn't does seem all that likely to me.
Given his statement of taking a sort of relaxed approach after work, and Tesla's infamous work schedule, and that he just came off of a sabbatical, I have a feeling there is the possibility that he just reevaluated what he wants to do with his life and is searching for a better balance. I took 2 months off of work and coming back it really makes you think about what you're spending time on vs what might be most important, especially if you've saved enough to be financially independent.
Or after 4 months off and having enough money to live without grueling work, he snapped out of it
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third: During his sabbatical he realized live is too short to be grinding away for a company and wants to do something more relaxed.
Soooo why does FSD cost 12k again? 😂
Robotaxi making your Tesla worth $1million each!!! Coming out in 2019.. I mean 2020.. I mean..
Probably to help subsidize the cost of upgrading everybody to HW4.
Ugggh this is what we were all worried about after the “Tesla Sabbatical” no one ever comes back from that
Summer 2019, I was sold on adding FSD for an additional $6K to my 3LRAWD. FSD seemed to be just around the corner.
Smart Summon seemed to show it was getting closer.
Then came a few years of phantom braking, weird lane-recentering when an on-ramp merges into my lane, and I realized we were waaaaaaaaaaaaaay far from real FSD.
I had been bamboozled.
I love the car and believe we are watching the future unfold. But Autopilot and FSD needs to get dramatically better to be a real deal.
If I was heading a team for that at Tesla I would either demand the resources (people, money, test environments, vision/support) to make it really happen, or move on to another entity that is hungry to make the real thing happen.
Andrej: Elon, I've really reached burnout on your crazy-ass schedules and can't go on.
Elon: Take some time off to recover and you'll come back happy to put the chains back on.
Andrej: Okay.
Andrej: Now that I've had time off, burnout didn't go away and I've now realized I need a life. I quit.
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There goes my 10k in FSD out the door
I feel like new blood would be a positive thing, nothing against Andrej at all, it seems though like the momentum has slowed substantially. A fresh perspective could bring better focus and clarity.
That's just the nature of the problem. Going from an interevention per mile, to every 10 miles, to every 10,000 miles is harder and harder.
He was never on a sabbatical, Elon just asked him to delay the announcement for 4 months. Let’s be real. As soon as he announced the sabbatical eLon tweeted something in the lines of ,” well don’t worry he doesn’t run the day to day on the FSD team anyways that’s somebody else”
Couldn’t have the stock tank from it with the twitter offer on his mind. You know, especially since the twitter purchase was a cash out ploy.
This is so sad... huge loss for the company :(
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What an interesting way to mess up the metaphor.
It's 'this is the final nail in the coffin'.
it is, needs additional front cameras. HW4 has a fascia camera which was supposed to roll into the S/X by now, but was delayed until after CT which will launch with it (you can even see the camera on the bumper "grill" on the CT prototypes).
Where have you seen non-rumor based info on HW4?
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Harrison Holley, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
In his talk he mentioned that most of the work now was training the system with new data which is something that less qualified people can do. I expect he wants to move on to a more conceptual programming position somewhere.
But where are they going so find someone else whose name is Car Path?
I fucking knew it. "Sabbatical" pfft what a charade. I knew it when I heard how Elon was downplaying Karpathy's role on Lex's podcast.
I'll put money on he's actually been on garden leave and will join Ford or someone soon.
City streets is nowhere near where I drive, The Netherlands. In three years I have seen little progression. Snaps out at every roudabout, tries to divert into a safety spot instead of the exit 100 yards further. Still, after the exit to a Supercharger no attempt to approach nearer to the Supercharger. That should have been a promotinal feature long time ago! I gambled a few grand towards this thing called FSD, but Andrej did not get us anywhere near.
Self driving never materialized under his watch.
This is exactly what many amongst us predicted when he first announced his sabbatical. Honestly, it was not hard to predict seeing the progress or the lack thereof with Auto pilots intended vision from Elon against reality. Personally, I think Karpathy's reality of what Auto Piliot is capable of in near term clashed with Elon's PR vision he's projecting and Karpathy is not OK endorsing that idea.
Damn RIP to my $TSLA shares.
Sinking ship
For those worried, he left 4 months ago and the team adjusted to continue without his inputs a while ago too.
Best of luck in your new endeavors if you read this Andrej.
Elon ❤️️ reducing expensive inputs
Most expensive being Elon .
You won’t see a high level departure have impact publicly within 4 months. Within the last 4 months FSD hasn’t become much better or worse.
Seriously. Oh, the wheels didn't immediately come off when he went on sabbatical? I'd fucking hope so considering how much money they've put into it.
Every current owner of FSD will not see FSD on their car. That’s what this departure tells me. Maybe next decade
Wow
I'm certainly sorry to hear the news. I wish him well in his future endeavors.
His last name is Kar Path?
I think it's fine. He had a long tenure and probably has his sight on new challenges. Sometimes challenges of grand magnitude require a change of management and direction. And it's clear that, even though the company had made huge progress towards FSD under Karpathy's direction, they also stalled immensely in the eyes of the general public and us FSD-bagholders.
They need some fresh new blood, and as long as Musk can course correct his damn persona and keep his focus straight on solving the FSD challenges, the company will prevail and come out on top.
My 2 cent.
Hoping he works at google so that Waymo can expand
not good
Lololol imagine paying thousands for a software that will never be completed
Well it's not like my 2017 S100D with FSD can safely drive itself in any conditions......
“The overwhelming focus is solving full self-driving. That’s essential. That’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.” - Elon Musk
Fires 230 autopilot workers and loses the autopilot team leader.
Yeah, things are going great.
apple will hire him 😅🤷🏽♂️
Lol FSD is never gunna happen. Sucks for all the kick starters out there
Lucid says hello
As a purely basic adaptive cruise and mild use of AutoPilot, it really is a love/hate relationship. Its some of the worst adaptive cruise logic I have ever used in a car. Its either too aggressive or too passive, its never in between. It brakes annoying hard and speeds up far too quick. Our Polestar has 10x better adaptive cruise system.
AutoPilot is great though, super confident in its ability but it uses the same adaptive cruise logic of pure aggression. It sucks that adaptive cruise is just so bad in Tesla.
Maybe he just liked working from home more...
thats ok, as long as the team is heading in the right direction he accomplished his goals. Working for tesla or spacex is very demanding as the problems they are trying to solve are hard. its ok to take a break leave a company or pivot. this how silicon valley got started from employees who left fairchild semiconductor, atari, xerox and so on.
Is Autopilot synonymous with FSD in this case? It's weird to see so many folks refer to Autopilot and FSD as interchangeable, when they're very different things at the sales level, and on different stacks at the software level.
I wonder if he was "asked to leave." The project has been delayed year after year, not necessarily his fault, but maybe tesla wants to give someone else a chance and is no longer happy with his performance. The fact that he has nothing lined up currently and the recent AI layoffs make me suspicious.
Saw this coming a mile away.
Director of AI at Tesla, leading the Autopilot Vision team leaves Tesla, pregnant.
Fixed it for you.
Gregnant?
this makes me wonder if the working environment at tesla is really that toxic. why would this guy leave tesla right on the cusp of full ai driving? i'm guessing in less than 5 years tesla would have done it. then he would've been at the forefront of history. instead he left right before?
Perhaps somebody that wanted to keep working from home, but wasn’t allowed.