On Tuesday, Tesla’s vice president of Autopilot software Chris Lattner announced that he would be leaving Tesla just six months after he joined. Lattner wrote on Twitter: “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!
Lattner joined Tesla after leaving Apple in January. He had worked at Apple since 2005 and is credited with creating the Swift programming language. Lattner doesn’t appear to have plans for the future just yet, as he tweeted, “My resume is easy to find online. 7 years of Swift experience”Tesla hired Lattner just as it dropped a partnership with Mobileye and announced that it would be developing hardware and software for Autopilot in house to reach Level 5 autonomy—or fully autonomous driving—faster.
Ars reached out to Tesla about the split with Lattner, and the company responded that "Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best."
According to TechCrunch, Tesla has also hired a new deep learning and computer vision expert who has been working at artificial intelligence nonprofit OpenAI. Andrej Karpathy will work as Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, reporting directly to Elon Musk and working with Jim Keller, who directs both hardware and software efforts at Tesla. Karpathy has a PhD from Stanford in computer vision and previously interned at Google’s DeepMind lab in London.
In a statement, Tesla wrote that Karpathy has "demonstrated the ability to derive complex descriptions of images using a deep neural net. For example, identifying not simply that there is a cat in a given picture, but that it is an orange, spotted cat, riding on a skateboard with red wheels on brown hardwood flooring."
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