Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy is on a sabbatical, confirms he will be back to his job

While discussing Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta for Canada with Tesla owners and enthusiasts this past Sunday, Elon Musk revealed that the company’s Director of Artificial Intelligence Andrej Karpathy is on a 4-month sabbatical.

Because Andrej left at a critical time when Tesla is expanding the FSD Beta software release to eligible owners in Canada, analysts thought this was not a good time for this move. Some even predicted that this might be the last we have seen of him at Tesla as in the past some executives first went on a sabbatical and left the company during the leave.

However, Andrej quoted Elon Musk’s tweet and further explained the reason for taking a break from his role at Tesla.

“Taking some time off to rest & travel after almost 5 years at Tesla. Esp excited to get focused time to re-sharpen my technical edge and train some neural nets! Though I already miss all the robots and GPU/Dojo clusters and looking forward to having them at my fingertips again,” Andrej stated.

Taking some time off to rest&travel after almost 5 years at Tesla. Esp excited to get focused time to re-sharpen my technical edge and train some neural nets! Though I already miss all the robots and GPU/Dojo clusters and looking forward to having them at my fingertips again ❤️😅 https://t.co/R2Yidw9Yma
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) March 27, 2022

In a follow-up tweet, Andrej told about his travel plans for this four-month period. He’s currently in the UK and will be visiting Europe and Asia during his vacations and will finally be back to Bay Area where the Tesla software team works and the Dojo cluster is in development.

A number of people asked – I am doing a “digital nomad” trip, packed up in one backpack and going east, saying hi to friends along the way and reading papers/writing code. Currently in UK, continuing to Europe, Asia and wrapping around back to Bay Area.
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) March 28, 2022

Andrej joined Tesla back in June 2017 and has been playing a critical role in the development of the Tesla Neural Net and Autopilot Vision. Before this role, he worked as a Research Scientist at OpenAI, another artificial intelligence startup by Elon Musk.

This is the time for Andrej to rejuvenate his physical and mental health and freshen up for some new ideas to flow in.

Elon Musk and Andrej Karpathy gave a phenomenal 2 hours+ presentation at last year’s Tesla AI Day (video below). This level of AI comprehension by Karpathy is a testament to his abilities in the field.