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.

Tesla has hired deep learning and computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy in a key Autopilot role. Karpathy most recently held a role as a researcher at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence nonprofit backed by Elon Musk. He has an extensive background in AI-related fields, having completed a PhD at Stanford University in computer vision. Karpathy also created one of the original, and most respected, deep learning courses taught at Stanford, and his dissertation work focused on creating a system by which a neural network could identify multiple discrete and specific items within an image, label them using natural language and report to a user. The dissertation also included developing a system that works in reverse, allowing for a model that can use descriptions from a user articulated in natural language (i.e.

Earlier this year Tesla announced engineer Chris Lattner would leave Apple and lead its Autopilot engineering team, but just five months later he is departing. Lattner, the designer of Apple's Swift programming language, tweeted "Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all," while Tesla announced it has hired Andrej Karpathy, "one of the world's leading experts in computer vision and deep learning." He will become the company's Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, reporting directly to CEO Elon Musk, who he may know well from his previous job as a research scientist at the Musk-backed OpenAI. 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. 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.

That said, I would have thought he was a bit young for a "Director" role. Most other big tech companies have directors of his professors' generation. Not doubting his skill, ability to communicate, or his passion, it just seems a pretty surprising move from a large company. Has Andrej ever managed a team before (beyond running a course or supervising some students)? And does he have any serious SDC experience?