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

The leader of the company's autopilot team is leaving.

The departure was announced on the social networking site.

It was a difficult decision to part ways, but it was a pleasure to help with its goals over the last five years. He wrote that in that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and that he was looking forward to seeing the strong team continue that.

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Karpathy said that he wants to do technical work in artificial intelligence, open source and education.

Musk thanked Karpathy for his work.

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The departure isn't entirely surprising, given that Karpathy took a four-month sabbatical in March, at a time whenTesla was struggling to finally launch the Full Self-Driving set of features in its vehicles.

In October 2020 it was limited to a small group of users and expanded to a larger group in December of that year. Since then, Musk has been promising a wider roll out, but it keeps getting delayed, and issues such as phantom braking and crashes are not helping.

It's possible that Karpathy's departure has something to do with the endless delays. Karpathy has been in charge of the autopilot software since the beginning of the year, and he has been a strong supporter of the idea of putting cameras in self-driving cars. This is not the case with other companies, such as GM, which rely on LiDAR for their self- driving cars.

Karpathy left after 229 employees were laid off from the Autopilot team.