Tesla hires deep learning expert as the new head of Autopilot vision

Tesla, the American automaker, recently confirmed that it had hired deep learning and computer vision expert, Andrej Karpathy. A few months earlier, Apple veteran Chris Lattner was hired to work on Tesla’s autonomous driving technology. But as Lattner quits, Andrej is going to be the director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision. Tesla hardware division chief, Jim Keller, will add the software division to his responsibilities. “Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change”, a Tesla spokeswoman mentioned in an email to Reuters.

In response Chris tweeted, “Turns out that Tesla isn’t a good fit for me after all. I’m interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!”  Andrej had previously been a researcher at OpenAI, a nonprofit effort to advance artificial intelligence started by Musk and other Silicon Valley veterans. He will now work closely with Jim Keller and directly report to Chief Executive, Elon Musk.

Andrej completed his computer vision PhD at Stanford University, where he demonstrated the ability to derive complex descriptions of images using a deep neural net. His work and expertise should prove a big asset to Tesla’s work on Autopilot in the area of Tesla Vision.

Tesla has been rebuilding its own version of Autopilot after parting with the Israeli tech company, Mobileye. CEO Elon Musk said, “It’s definitely been a tough slog transitioning from the Mobileye vision chip to Tesla’s internal vision system, but I think we’re almost there in terms of exceeding the ability of the hardware one cars.”