Tesla's New AI Guru Could Help Its Cars Teach Themselves

Elon Musk has hired a new director of AI research at Tesla, and it may signal a plan to rethink the way its automated driving works. This week, Musk poached Andrej Karpathy, an expert on vision, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, from OpenAI, a nonprofit that Musk and others are funding that's dedicated to "discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence." Karpathy, who will apparently report directly to Musk, is a rising star in the world of AI, having studied at Stanford with Fei-Fei Li, a leading AI expert who is now the chief scientist of Google Cloud. Li is famous in tech circles for having developed a data set of images that helped inspire a breakthrough in machine vision. Many have pointed to Karpathy's expertise in computer vision as a key asset for Tesla, and that's true.