Over the past few months, Tesla's Autopilot division has been plagued with management problems. Adding to the exodus is Chris Lattner who was hired six months back to lead the Autopilot software team at Tesla.
A Tesla spokesperson confirmed the departure saying: "Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best."
With Lattner parting ways with the company, his responsibilities have been divided between Jim Keller, who was already the head of the Autopilot’s hardware team, and a new hire. Tesla has hired deep learning and computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy in a key Autopilot role- first reported by Techcrunch. Karpathy till recently held a role as a researcher at OpenAI, an AI non-profit backed by Elon Musk.
Karpathy is also the name behind one of the most respected and original deep learning courses taught at Stanford, and his dissertation work focused on creating a system by which neural network could identify multiple discrete and specific items within an image, label them using natural language and report to a user. The dissertation also included developing a system that works in reverse, allowing for a model that can use descriptions from a user articulated in natural language and find that object in a given image.
Tesla provided the following statement to TechCrunch regarding Karpathy's hiring and responsibilities: Andrej Karpathy, one of the world's leading experts in deep learning and computer vision 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.
Meanwhile, Lattner tweeted this about his exit.
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!
— Chris Lattner (@clattner_llvm) June 21, 2017