Elon Musk has publicly invited Tesla’s former AI chief Andrej Karpathy to reunite with him, following a tweet Karpathy posted praising the newly opened Tesla Diner in Los Angeles.
“Love this! Supercharger, diner, … but really a kind of exhibit for the future,” Karpathy wrote on X (formerly Twitter), referring to Tesla’s retro-futuristic Supercharger-restaurant-drive-in movie theater hybrid. Musk quote-posted the tweet with a heartfelt message: “Andrej, my long lost brother, let us work together again!”
Karpathy, who led Tesla’s Autopilot team during a crucial period in the company’s self-driving development, left the company in July 2022 after five years. He joined when Tesla had just two people training neural networks and helped scale its AI efforts to power Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD). However, Karpathy said that by the end, his role had shifted from hands-on AI development to more of a “corporate executive role,” prompting his decision to leave and focus on technical work.
Before joining Tesla, Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and has been a prominent figure in deep learning, computer vision, and large-scale model training.
If he were to accept Musk’s invitation, Karpathy would have plenty of high-stakes AI projects to sink his teeth into. Tesla is currently piloting unsupervised FSD in Austin as it ramps up for a full Robotaxi rollout. There’s also the Optimus humanoid robot, which Tesla hopes to start using internally as early as this year. And over at xAI, Musk’s new AI venture, ambitions for artificial general intelligence (AGI) are quickly heating up.
Given Musk’s current obsession with AI across his companies, Karpathy’s return could supercharge more than just Teslas.