Andrej Karpathy, senior director in charge of AI and computer vision at Tesla, announced that he is leaving the automaker. It is a big loss for Tesla's Autopilot team and self-driving effort. Karpathy joined Tesla more than five years ago as a neural net and computer vision expert. He quickly rose through the ranks and became a big part of Tesla's Autopilot team and the automaker's effort to develop a full self-driving system. As Tesla expanded its effort from self-driving to broader artificial intelligence, Karpathy was promoted to senior director of AI at Tesla.

Washington, DC (CNN)Tesla (TSLA) is increasingly turning to machines rather than humans as it attempts to develop autonomous vehicles. As part of Tesla's plans to cut 10% of salaried staff, the company has laid off a significant number of its data annotation specialists. These specialists do grunt work that is critical to empowering artificial intelligence systems to handle complex tasks like driving safely down a city street. The layoffs were first reported by Bloomberg Tuesday and confirmed by CNN Business. Data annotation specialists use software tools to manually label objects in video clips collected from Tesla vehicles.

HOUSTON: Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who has been using social media to recruit people, has disclosed that Indian-origin Ashok Elluswamy was the first employee to be hired for his electric vehicle company's Autopilot team. "Ashok was the first person recruited from my tweet saying that Tesla is starting an Autopilot team!" Musk said in a tweet in reply to a video of his interview. He said that Ashok is actually the head of Autopilot engineering. "Andrej is director of AI; People often give me too much credit and give Andrej too much credit. The Tesla Autopilot AI team is extremely talented. Some of the smartest people in the world," he said.

NIO, the Chinese electric car company with tens of billions of dollars in cash on hand, has accelerated its expansion and begun to invest more in its automated driving software. Jamie Carlson, the North American-based vice president in charge of NIO's automated driving business, left the company in June, and Ren Shaoqing, formerly Momenta's director of research and development, has joined NIO, hinting that NIO will increase its investment in automated driving technology, according to 36Kr. Ren Shaoqing serves as assistant vice president and reports directly to NIO CEO Li Bin, the report said, adding that a NIO executive confirmed the information. Jamie Carlson, who left Apple in October 2016 to join NIO's North American R&D center, has returned to Apple's Special Projects Group, where the company's Titan car project is based. According to the report, the departure of Jamie Carlson and the addition of Ren Shaoqing is in line with NIO's return to China to focus its self-driving strategy.

Tesla has acquired DeepScale, a Silicon Valley startup that uses low-wattage processors to power more accurate computer vision, in a bid to improve its Autopilot driver assistance system and deliver on CEO Elon Musk's vision to turn its electric vehicles into robotaxis. CNBC was the first to report the acquisition. TechCrunch independently confirmed the deal with two unnamed sources, although neither one would provide more information on the financial terms of the deal. Tesla vehicles are not considered fully autonomous, or Level 4, a designation by SAE that means the car can handle all aspects of driving in certain conditions without human intervention. Instead, Tesla vehicles are "Level 2," and its Autopilot feature is a more advanced driver assistance system than most other vehicles on the road today.

Tesla has acquired DeepScale, a Silicon Valley startup that uses low-wattage processors to power more accurate computer vision, in a bid to improve its Autopilot driver assistance system and deliver on CEO Elon Musk's vision to turn its electric vehicles into robotaxis. CNBC was the first to report the acquisition. TechCrunch independently confirmed the deal with two unnamed sources, although neither one would provide more information on the financial terms of the deal. Tesla vehicles are not considered fully autonomous, or Level 4, a designation by SAE that means the car can handle all aspects of driving in certain conditions without human intervention. Instead, Tesla vehicles are "Level 2," and its Autopilot feature is a more advanced driver assistance system than most other vehicles on the road today.