Andrej Karpathy considers returning to Tesla to work on Optimus [video]

Tesla’s former AI Director, Andrej Karpathy, recently made an appearance on Lex Fridman’s podcast. Karpathy is an AI researcher, engineer, educator and a founding member of OpenAI. He spoke with Fridman on a variety of topics, including AI, his departure from Tesla, and his interest in returning to the company.

Karpathy’s five-year tenure at Tesla was a pivotal part of the company’s AI development. During his time with the company, he helped advance Tesla’s self-driving system from lane-keeping on highways to partially autonomous driving on city streets.

After taking a four-month sabbatical, Karpathy parted ways with Tesla in July 2022. When Karpathy announced he was leaving Tesla, he said it was a difficult decision and thanked the Tesla Autopilot team, looking forward to seeing their momentum continue. Karpathy also stated that he wanted to spend more time on his long-term passions including AI technology, open source, and education.

From the podcast, we learned more details about what led to Karpathy’s departure (1 hour, 44 minute mark). Apparently, his role at the company had developed into more of a managerial position, which drifted away from his passion for technical work in AI.

Karpathy said, “I think over time during those five years; I’ve kind of gotten myself into a little bit of a managerial position. Most of my days were, you know, meetings and growing the organization and making decisions about sort of high-level strategic decisions about the team and what it should be working on and so on.”

“And it’s kind of like a corporate executive role, and I can do it. I think I’m okay at it, but it’s not like fundamentally what I enjoy, and so I think when I joined, there was no computer vision team because Tesla was just going from the transition of using Mobileye, a third-party vendor, for all of its computer vision to having to build its computer vision system. So when I showed up, there were two people training deep neural networks.”

Elon Musk was quick to react to Karpathy’s interview, stating on Twitter that “Andrej will always be welcome at Tesla.”

Karpathy played a key role in Tesla’s FSD development and it would be great to see him return for a second act. Based on his interview, it sounds like he may be interested in returning to Tesla to work on the Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot.

Karpathy’s Interview

You can watch Karpathy’s full interview with Lex Fridman below.

Since the launch of Start FSD from Park earlier this year, owners who use PIN to Drive were faced with an interesting choice. Should they stick with the additional security offered by PIN to Drive, or use the added convenience of the “Start FSD” button?

Unfortunately, the features were not compatible, forcing you to use one or the other. For users of PIN to Drive, the Start FSD button would simply not show up.

Now, in an undocumented change in update 2025.32.3.1, Tesla has finally resolved this conflict and integrated Start FSD from Park, even if you have PIN to Drive enabled.

EASTER EGG DISCOVERED IN TESLA SOFTWARE V2025.32.3.1

To whoever @Tesla heard this feedback and finally remediated the compatibility issue between “PIN to Drive” and “Start FSD (Supervised) from Park, THANK YOU! I always felt like I wasn’t getting the full FSD experience due to… pic.twitter.com/6ah68gnKDD

— Dan Burkland (@DBurkland) September 11, 2025

The Old, Multi-Step Workflow

The on-screen Start FSD button was designed to be the ultimate convenience. Get in your car, put your seatbelt on, and tap one button to get going. However, for owners using the popular PIN-to-Drive feature, it meant additional steps to get FSD started.

The process was a series of manual steps. Previously, a user would have to manually shift into Drive, enter their PIN, and then engage FSD with the stalk or scroll wheel. This completely bypassed the convenience of the Start FSD button and seeing the magic of FSD shifting out of Park and into Drive.

Perfect Integration

The latest update completely overhauls this workflow, and keeps the button’s convenience, along with PIN-to-Drive’s safety and security. The new process is what you’d expect. The Start FSD button now shows up, and PIN to Drive users can tap it like everyone else. Upon tapping the button, the vehicle will prompt you for your PIN before shifting out of park and beginning its journey.

It’s not clear why it took so long to solve this issue with PIN to Drive, but it’s another great reason to have car software updates that fix or add features to vehicles over time.

Tesla continues to listen to feedback and will soon have a tool available for owners to submit feature requests.

Despite widespread assumptions about Tesla’s gigacasting technologies, a new report reveals that large structural castings simplify both assembly and collision repair.

For years, a pervasive narrative has shadowed Tesla’s innovative gigacasting technology. While revolutionary for manufacturing efficiency, these massive single-piece castings were widely believed to be a repair nightmare, driving up costs and complexity in the event of a collision.

However, a new report from Thatcham Research directly challenges this assumption, concluding that gigacasting can actually save on vehicle repair expenses. This finding is supported by none other than Wes Morrill, Tesla’s Lead Engineer for the Cybertruck, who stated:

If you simplify the body design with large structural castings, it’s better both for initial assembly and for repair.

The Fears of Gigacastings

The traditional fears surrounding gigacastings centered on the idea that if a section of the casting was damaged, the entire piece would need to be replaced. That means exorbitant labor costs and extensive replacement of parts, small and large. The Thatcham Research study, however, presents a different reality, suggesting that the very design principles that help Tesla streamline production also inherently simplify repairs.

Fewer Parts, Easier Fixes

The core of that myth was based on a misunderstanding of how structural castings are designed and repaired. Conventional vehicle bodies are assemblies of hundreds of stamped metal parts, welded, riveted, and bonded together.

This creates numerous potential failure points and connections between parts, which can cause forces to propagate during a collision, resulting in damage to unrelated areas. Repairing such a structure often involves sectioning, cutting, and rejoining smaller components.

Gigacastings, by contrast, drastically reduce the number of individual parts. Tesla’s approach simplifies the vehicle’s body into a few large, structurally robust segments. This means fewer parts, so less labor, fewer welds, and faster production lines during initial assembly.

In collision repair, with fewer individual components and a more integrated structure, damage can often be more localized, or when a replacement is necessary, it involves fewer parts than repairing a traditional multi-segment body. Tesla uses advanced repair methods, including Gigacast Sectioning to replace only damaged portions of the casting, rather than the entire piece.

To put that into numbers, the study found that partial repairs on a Model Y’s rear gigacast resulted in savings of over £2,000 ($2,700 USD) compared to similar repairs on a Model 3 with a conventional multi-part steel body.

Recasting the Repair Paradigm

The implications of this study are larger than you might think, especially for both the automotive insurance and collision repair industries. Insurers, wary of potential total loss scenarios due to gigacasting damage, will likely look to re-evaluate their models with this new information.

Repair shops, which might have anticipated requiring specialized equipment and training for gigacastings, will likely find the streamlined design, when approached with new techniques, easier and faster to repair than before.

Tesla’s first-principles approach to engineering, often focused on its manufacturing innovations, also extends its benefits throughout the vehicle’s lifespan. While multi-section bodies have been the norm, Tesla is always challenging, breaking, and redefining those rules. Gigacastings are here to stay and becoming more common throughout the automotive industry.