Tesla’s former Director of Artificial Intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, recently sat down for an interview with MIT researcher Lex Fridman on the latter’s podcast.
The engineer, also one of the founding members of OpenAI, talked about everything from aliens and the universe to Tesla Autopilot and working with Elon Musk.
According to Karpathy, he learned “how to create efficient organizations and how to fight entropy in an organization” from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The engineer parted ways with Tesla earlier this year in July, following a four-month sabbatical from the company.
On leaving Tesla, Karpathy said he simply “decided to do much more technical things again.” Karpathy joined Tesla when the company only had two people training neural networks for Autopilot. He would go on to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team but towards the end of his five-year stint at the company, the researcher said his job turned into more of a “corporate executive role.”
Karpathy spent most of his time on meetings, growing the organization, and making high-level strategic decisions about the AI team and what it should be working on — which wasn’t quite his jam.
“I love the company a lot, and I love Elon. I love Tesla. It was hard to leave,” Karpathy told Fridman. He was quick to note that he hasn’t shut the door on a potential return to Tesla, though. Karpathy said he would potentially be interested in “coming back at some point.”
The feeling appears to be mutual, as Musk said in a tweet that Karpathy would “always be welcome at Tesla.”
Andrej will always be welcome at Tesla
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2022
Beyond Autopilot, Tesla is planning to flex its AI prowess with Optimus, an autonomous, humanoid robot that the company unveiled at its AI Day event last month. During the interview, Karpathy talked at length about what Tesla is doing with Optimus.
He also expressed interest in working on Optimus and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) at Tesla. “I think Tesla is going to do incredible things.”
You can check out the full interview below:
Back in August, Karpathy started his own YouTube channel where he shares his extensive knowledge of AI. You can check that out here.
