June 21, 2017—Tesla on Tuesday confirmed that it had hired a major figure in artificial intelligence (AI) to be its new head of AI and Autopilot vision, according to CNBC.
Andrej Karpathy, who is joining from nonprofit research lab OpenAI, has done extensive work in trendy areas in AI such as reinforcement learning and generative adversarial networks (GANs). Before joining OpenAI, Karpathy worked at Alphabet, where he spent time at the DeepMind AI research group.
The move comes as Chris Lattner, Tesla's vice president of the Autopilot autonomous driving technology, departs. Tesla hired the Apple veteran earlier this year. Apple CEO Tim Cook last week confirmed to Bloomberg that the iPhone maker is indeed working on self-driving car technology.
Jim Keller replaces Lattner as head of Autopilot hardware and software.
Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk is also a co-founder and chairman of OpenAI, which was established in late 2015. Karpathy will report directly to Musk and will work closely with Keller, the Tesla spokeswoman wrote.
