Tesla's high-profile Autopilot manager steps down

Andrej Karpathy, a high-profile Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) executive who played a key role in the development of the electric carmaker's artificial intelligence and driver assistance technology, announced on Wednesday that he was leaving the company.

Karpathy's departure, who gave no reason for leaving, comes at a critical time as Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk races to achieve full autonomous driving capability this year after missing earlier targets several times. Karpathy's departure "likely reflects challenges to Tesla's progress in FSD/robotaxy," Credit Suisse analyst Dan Levy wrote in an investor note. Tesla's shares fell 1% to $704 in extended trading. The departure of Karpathy, a senior director of artificial intelligence, comes after Tesla on Tuesday announced it was closing its office in San Mateo, California, part of the team that developed its "Autopilot" driver-assist technology, and laying off more than 200 people there. Karpathy, who worked in the company's Palo Alto office, led Tesla Autopilot's computer vision team and oversaw efforts to train the AI technology using data collected from Tesla vehicles on the road. "It has been a pleasure to help Tesla achieve its goals over the last 5 years and it was a difficult decision to part ways," Karpathy tweeted, adding that he had no concrete plans for what he would do next. Musk responded with a tweet: "Thank you for everything you've done for Tesla! It was an honor to work with you." Tesla's driver-assistant technology has made great strides during Karpathy's tenure, but the technology has fallen short of Musk's promises, who said in 2019 that Tesla would launch self-driving taxis by 2020. "I predict there will be an internal promotion to fill Karpathy's position. It will not be easy to find someone with Karpathy's experience and knowledge from the outside," said Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Musk said in a podcast interview in January that Karpathy played an important role, but added: "People will give me a lot of credit and they will give Andrej a lot of credit." In late March, Karpathy said he was taking a four-month sabbatical to "re-sharpen my technical side." Karpathy is not the only Tesla executive to resign after taking a break. Then-head of engineering Doug Field joined Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) in 2018 after taking time off to "recharge". He now works at Ford.