One more Tesla executive has left the electric car company, with the departure of Autopilot chief engineer Jim Keller to Intel, according to Bloomberg. Keller joined Tesla two years ago with a background in chip development, and had his last day at his post with the electric car maker last Tuesday, the report said.
The Palo Alto, California-based company has had a challenging first quarter. It posted its biggest quarterly loss yet in February, and another Autopilot-related fatality occurred in March, this time involving a Model X. Meanwhile, production of the Model 3 was temporarily halted in April to address bottlenecks.
Keller’s Autopilot responsibilities, which previously included low-voltage hardware, Autopilot software and infotainment, will now be divided. Pete Bannon, who has been at the company for more than two years, will be in charge of Autopilot hardware, while Tesla director of AI and Autopilot Vision Andrej Karpathy will be responsible for Autopilot software.
Last month, the development of autonomous cars also took a hit with the fatality of a pedestrian involving an Uber test vehicle, which led to the suspension of test programmes in Arizona. The ride-sharing company reached a settlement with the family of the victim, and later stated that it still has faith in the prospects of autonomous vehicles.
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Robots for most things are incredibly helpful, efficient and effective. But when it comes to cars? Cars need human controls to the car movement at all times. But when robot is in control, is it still necessary for humans to be in control? It actually looks like it’s not necessary, but it still does need human control.
At this “elementary stage” of robot cars as it’s something we have never had experienced before, we can’t really know how safe it really is. Danger is something we must totally avoid. Humans are to monitor it every second when it’s moving. Because safety of the car, the avoidance of any accident, mistake or mishap is of utmost importance. And for the people who are eager for this robot car as a toy car that can just run on it’s own, you’d better forget about this dream. Maybe in next many years or centuries, it is possible. But sorry to say, not at this time.
Reminds me of the mentality in Tech scene; whenever a robot comes out and exhibited, the same inane dullard questions exist: can it wash my clothes? Can it do dishes?
Apply that mentality to the same demographic in autonomous cars, there you have it. It’s still at its infancy, but every wealthy john and barry expecting more out of Elon’s car. And then they wonder why the hell their shiny new cars didn’t work out as ‘advertised’….
Wow… Tesla had the guy that developed AMD’s best selling Athlon and Zen processors, Apple’s A series processors and the person that made current computer faster with the creation of x64 architecture and multiple processors connections… These new Tesla chips is going to be really great!
hardware and software are 2 different disciplines. AI is software while chips are hardware and require a electrical enginnering background.