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.

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.

Roman Mugriyev was driving his long-haul 18-wheeler down a two-lane Texas highway when he saw an oncoming car drift into his lane just a few hundred feet ahead. There was a ditch to his right and more oncoming cars to his left, so there was little for him to do but hit his horn and brake. "I could hear the man who taught me to drive telling me what he always said was rule number one: 'Don't hurt anybody,'" Mugriyev recalls. But it wasn't going to work out that way. It shattered his front axle, and he struggled to keep his truck and the wrecked car now fused to it from hitting anyone else as it barreled down the road. After Mugriyev finally came to a stop, he learned that the woman driving the car had been killed in the collision.

"Go, go!" was the thought racing through Grégoire Courtine's mind. The French neuroscientist was watching a macaque monkey as it hunched aggressively at one end of a treadmill. His team had used a blade to slice halfway through the animal's spinal cord, paralyzing its right leg. Now Courtine wanted to prove he could get the monkey walking again. To do it, he and colleagues had installed a recording device beneath its skull, touching its motor cortex, and sutured a pad of flexible electrodes around the animal's spinal cord, below the injury.