Chris Lattner Who Left Apple For Tesla Resigns From Elon Musk’s Company; Find Out Why

Tesla’s Autopilot program head Chris Lattner, who previously exited Apple for the automaker, has announced his departure from Elon Musk’s company just six months after joining it. Tesla has since revealed that computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy has joined the company’s Tesla Vision project.

On Tuesday, Lattner surprised everyone when he took to Twitter to announce his decision to leave Tesla. “Turns out that Tesla isn’t a good fit for me at all,” he wrote before adding that he’s now “interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader.”

Prior to resigning from Apple back in January, Lattner worked on the Swift programming language of the Cupertino giant. After Lattner was successfully poached by Tesla, he revealed in an interview how he intended to “accelerate the path to cars being appliances that solve people’s problems.” However, it’s quite impossible now for Lattner to realize that goal.

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Lattner’s exit is just one of the couple of high-profile resignations from Tesla’s Autopilot program for the past few months. According to Apple Insider, the departures come amid Musk’s gesture of pressuring Tesla engineers to develop an autonomous car system. The current Autopilot system is semi-autonomous in nature, and Musk is aiming to showcase a fully autonomous vehicle by the end of this year.

Tesla has already confirmed Lattner’s exit in a statement to Wall Street Journal. “Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change,” a spokesperson for the company stated. “We wish him the best.” At the time of Tesla’s confirmation, it was revealed that Jim Keller, who oversees hardware for the Autopilot division of Tesla, was taking over Lattner’s duties for the time being.

Meanwhile, deep learning and computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy has just been hired to play a key role in the Autopilot program. Tech Crunch has learned that Karpathy will henceforth serve as Director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla and work closely with Keller. The latter part makes sense since the company’s compute vision system called Tesla Vision is going to support Autopilot, which Keller is now in charge of leading, hardware- and software-wise.

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“Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s leading experts in computer vision and deep learning, is joining Tesla as Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, reporting directly to Elon Musk,” Tesla said in a statement. “Andrej has worked to give computers vision through his work on ImageNet, as well as imagination through the development of generative models, and the ability to navigate the internet with reinforcement learning. He was most recently a Research Scientist at OpenAI … Andrej will work closely with Jim Keller, who now has overall responsibility for Autopilot hardware and software.”

Karpathy has also worked at Google’s DeepMind, and he has attended both the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. He completed a PhD in computer vision at Stanford University. He also has extensive background in AI-related fields. Based on his experience, Karpathy would be a good fit for Tesla Motors.