Karpathy resigned after a four-month sabbatical.

A key piece in Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) Autopilot and Full Self Driving development, Andrej Karpathy, who was senior director in charge of AI and computer vision at the company, has resigned after a four-month sabbatical. The ostensible reason for the move: to pursue “long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education.” However, Karpathy said he still had no concrete plans for what’s next. (Elektrek)

“It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways. In that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum,” Karpathy said in a tweet on Thursday.

Karpathy quickly ascended the ranks of the EV company after joining over five years ago in the role of a neural net and computer vision expert.

He came to play a key role in the company’s Autopilot team and the project to develop a full self-driving (FSD) system and was soon appointed as senior director of AI.

In his reply to Karpathy, Elon Musk tweeted: “Thanks for everything you have done for Tesla! It has been an honor working with you.”

However, Karpathy’s departure comes after 200 people were laid-off at the Autopilot department. These events may potentially delay progress on the FSD.

Note that Musk said on the company’s fourth-quarter-earnings call: “I would be shocked if we do not achieve full-self-driving safer than a human this year. I would be shocked.”

With just five months left for the year to end, that may be a tall order.

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