Tesla has hired Andrej Karpathy, an artificial intelligence researcher at OpenAI, a non-profit backed by Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk. Karpathy created the deep learning courses at Stanford and interned at Google’s DeepMind which focuses on deep learning. There’s no doubt that his introduction at Tesla will be a massive boon for the company.
In his new role, Karpathy will be director of AI and Autopilot Vision. He’ll work closely with Jim Keller, according to a statement put out by the company:
“Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s leading experts in computer vision and deep learning, is joining Tesla as Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, reporting directly to Elon Musk. Andrej has worked to give computers vision through his work on ImageNet, as well as imagination through the development of generative models, and the ability to navigate the internet with reinforcement learning. He was most recently a Research Scientist at OpenAI … Andrej will work closely with Jim Keller, who now has overall responsibility for Autopilot hardware and software.”
Although the subject of driverless cars as the primary means of transport by road in the near future is currently under debate, we got the results of a report from the US’ National Transportation Safety Board yesterday, which established that the former Navy SEAL Joshua Brown - who was involved in a fatal car crash while driving the Tesla Model S in Autopilot mode back in 2016 - was warned several times by his Tesla vehicle that he should take over control from Autopilot. Brown's refusal to comply with the directions ended up in him receiving fatal injuries in a collision with a truck. Tesla will be hoping that with Karpathy in its team, the company will be able to further improve its Autopilot system to avoid accidents like these in the future.
Source: TechCrunch
