Tesla AI Head Andrej Karpathy Parts Ways With The Company After A Months-Long Sabbatical

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Tesla’s AI head Andrej Karpathy calls it quits, Honda’s museum accidentally leaks the new Civic Type R, Jeep offers some new colors. All this and more in today’s issue of The Morning Dump.

Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.

Tesla’s Head Of AI Has Left The Building


We saw this coming, right? After a months-long sabbatical, Tesla’s Director of AI Andrej Karpathy has decided to part ways with the Texas-based EV firm. Karpathy took to Twitter on Wednesday to announce his departure, with the reasons for his decision to part ways remaining unclear. Here’s what Karpathy had to say in a statement about next steps.

I have no concrete plans for what’s next but look to spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education.

Well, leaving a job without having anything lined up on the other side usually speaks volumes of the working environment, so good on Karpathy for pursuing his dreams. By departing from Tesla, Karpathy joins the likes of Tesla Semi lead Jerome Guillen, Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel, and Director of Autopilot Software Christopher ‘CJ’ Moore in having left high-ranking technical roles at Tesla in the past few years.

Interestingly, Karpathy’s departure comes just as Reuters reports that Tesla is laying off 229 data annotation workers assigned to its Autopilot advanced driver assist suite. If the future of Tesla’s driver assist program didn’t look shaky before, it sure does now.

This Is Likely The New Civic Type R

Civic Type R Leak
Screenshot: Honda

While the next Honda Civic Type R is set to launch on July 20, Honda’s Japanese web team seems to have had other plans. The above image surfaced on Honda’s Japanese factory museum website a full week ahead of schedule, and it seems to depict a Civic with all manner of sporty add-ons.

Honestly, if this is the next Civic Type R, it looks pretty good. Handsome, refined, a bit more mature. The massive rear wing and mail slot hood scoop definitely prevent it from being Golf R subtle, but it feels like it strikes the right balance. The trademark red seats still look a touch overstuffed [Editor’s Note: Can you really tell that from this picture, Thomas? Really? – JT] and the new front end still has some of the Civic’s Beluga face going on, but I could drive this thing to an office building without looking like a juvenile dork.

Of course, there’s still lots we don’t know about the next Civic Type R. Mechanical revisions and interior additions are tightly under wraps, but it won’t be long until we know a whole lot more about Honda’s next superhatch. Truth be told, I liked the old Civic Type R a lot. While it wasn’t the most livable thing on the planet, it just felt so special and cohesive, proof that a good car is so much greater than a spec sheet. Will the new one continue that cohesion while fending off fresh competition from Hyundai and Volkswagen? Only time will tell.

Holy Crap, The Cadillac Celestiq Has One Gorgeous Interior

Cadillac Celestiq Show Car 12
Photo credit: Cadillac

While the electric age isn’t the first time Cadillac’s tried to reinvent itself, it holds promise to be the most successful reinvention yet. The Lyriq electric crossover is already so distinctively Cadillac, and a range-topping hand-built Celestiq promises to rocket Cadillac back up to Standard Of The World status. Cadillac’s recently shared some additional photos of the Celestiq before its unveiling on July 22, and my god, they’ve pulled out all the stops with this one.

Wow, that’s a whole lot of red in there. Once the shock of the colorway dies down though, you begin to notice how absolutely exquisite most of the materials look. The woods, the leathers, the metal, the screens. Everything in here looks fit for something costing several hundred thousand dollars. Secondly, look at the sculpting. It’s so art deco, so quintessentially American. What we’ve seen of the Celestiq’s interior so far is wonderful because it shows that Cadillac knows who it is. Honestly, I can’t wait to see a whole lot more.

Get It In The Good Color

Jeep Wrangler Earl Reign
Photo credit: Jeep

David’s off in Germany right now, so I’m pleased to be the one reporting this little tidbit of Jeep news. Stellantis has always offered some really good colors, and the 2023 Jeep Wrangler is getting some fresh ones. Let’s start with the less interesting one, Earl. It’s a shade of gray, which means the name is a pun and that’s very alright indeed. While I’m not entirely sure if the tinge of aquamarine goes far enough to prevent Earl from looking like Nardo Grey shot with a tungsten white balance, Earl is likely to be a popular one in the new Wrangler community.

If you’re original and inspired though, you’ll want to tick the box for Reign. It’s also a pun, this time a shoutout of sorts to Prince. Purple is either merely good, or your favorite color in the whole wide world. I own purple shirts, a purple phone, and purple under-counter lighting for my kitchen, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I absolutely adore Reign as a color. In this press photo, it appears to have this wonderful dusty silver metallic quality that adds just that tiny level of extra dynamism most pigment nerds are seeking.

It’s worth noting that Earl and Reign are both limited-time colors that are expected to go away after the 2023 model year. So, if you are awesome and want your Jeep in an equally-awesome shade of purple, you might want to act quickly. Both colors are available on Sport, Sport S, Sahara, Rubicon, and 392 trims of the Wrangler, so you should just be able to tick the box. Proper choice in color, how about that?

The Flush

Whelp, time to drop the lid on today’s edition of The Morning Dump. Thursday is here which means the weekend is right around the corner. You know, these new Jeep colors have me wondering, what colors are in your fleet? While black, white, and gray are all quite popular, it’s nice to see something with a pop of color, or a crazy pearl, or some neat micro flakes.

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54 thoughts on “Tesla AI Head Andrej Karpathy Parts Ways With The Company After A Months-Long Sabbatical

  1. Colors in our fleet?

    In order of acquiring:

    1. 2007 Cobalt – Summit White
    2. 2014 Cruze Diesel (wife’s) – Black Granite Metallic
    3. 1981 Camaro Z28 – Maroon (with silver graphics); top half is heavily patina’d
    4. 2017 Volt – Summit White

    1. I also have a Cruze in Black Granite Metallic. It pops when it’s clean and the polished aluminum Eco wheels are clean. The rest of the time it’s ehh.

  2. I have a bit of a green fetish, but my fleet consists of:

    3 green (two cars, one truck)
    2 gray (one car, one truck)
    1 red (truck)
    3 green (motorcycles)
    1 yellow/orange (motorcycle)

  3. 2004 Toyota Tundra: Silver Sky Metallic (yeah, it’s gray)
    2017 Fiat 500e: Celeste Blu (saweet little car that has a size, shape and color that just makes me smile every time I look at it)

  4. My primary car (1996) is green, my secondary car (2004) is white, my tertiary car (1997) is grey.

    My kids cars are grey (2015), black(2016), and blue(2008).

    The only one I purchased was the green one. The secondary/tertiary are hand me downs from my dad’s fleet that my kids learned to drive on and then their mother bought them newer/nicer cars.

  5. Our current car is a 2019 Golf in Titan Blue, and we’re pretty happy with it. Our six-year old niece told me that it makes her smile every time she sees it, since it’s not “just another boring white car like everything else.”

  6. Looking highly forward to seeing that Caddy! I haven’t been this excited to see a new Cadillac since going to the Chicago Auto show back when the rolled out the “Sixteen”.

    I think that since I tend to gravitate towards the cheap and cheaper end of the vehicle spectrum, seven of the current fleet are white. Even the goofy little Spark is white, the one that actually had an abundance of wonderful factory colors to choose from. If I can ever find time, I need to dust off the paint gun and squirt something onto one of those blank canvases. The Volt in Jungle Green would likely be first.

  7. You would 100% look like a juvenile dork pulling up to an office building in that Type R. It screams “boy racer”, which is fine, but it’s not mature by any stretch of the imagination.

  8. Kudos to Cadillac for taking advantage of electrification to build something big, a little ostentatious, and extremely American again. Maybe MB will get the right idea and do something better with the next EQS.

    The idea of a purple 392 Wrangler also warms my bitter heart (although less so than Tuscadero Pink).

    My (four-wheeled) fleet is silver (like nlpnt, because I wanted a manual, but also because Mazda had dropped all non-greyscale options except maroon by the 2’s last year). I spraybombed the hubcaps lime green though (not the launch colour Mazda used, just whatever Home Depot had), so at least it’s a little less gloomy in the dead of winter.

  9. I’ll believe it when I see it in the flesh, Cadillac. You’ve teased me with gorgeous photos of things that never happened too many times.

    FCA’s color-naming game is the best in the business.

    I have yellow, blue, and silver. The silver was not by choice, but beggars can’t be choosers in this car market.

    1. Excuse me sir, but you seem to be confusing Cadillac, who has teased very few things, with Buick, who does only that and never gives us fucking anything.

  10. Not a Honda guy but that new Civic looks infinitely better than the last ‘all the vents’ model.

    Colors in our car fleet at home are one black work-provided truck, one black Mustang, one metallic brown Forester and one two-tone orange/white D100.

  11. “After a months-long sabbatical, Tesla’s Director of AI Andrej Karpathy has decided to part ways with the Texas-based EV firm.”

    Quoth Edgelord Moron himself: “Solving Full Self-Driving is really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.”
    Karpathy was the last man standing – literally every senior person associated with the FSD and AI projects has now quit Tesla, most of them without having anything else lined up first. Between the incredibly toxic work environment, the complete lack of progress, and Edgelord’s ignorant decrees (like insisting on using visual cameras only,) Tesla cannot ever achieve anything resembling level 3, forget level 5.
    Period. That’s just technical fact. And they certainly can’t when they’re being micromanaged by someone with a below room temperature IQ, who’s screaming at them and berating them for presenting facts, when he’s not busy sexually harassing, assaulting, or just fucking. And you sure as shit don’t lose every senior leader and fire the entire image analysis department (which made up no small percentage of the whole project team) because things are going great.

    “David’s off in Germany right now, so I’m pleased to be the one reporting this little tidbit of Jeep news.”
    Tell him if he’s anywhere near Heidenheim next week, I want to see the Voyager. I will gladly buy him a beer as well, but, he’ll need to translate the order for me.

    “If you’re original and inspired though, you’ll want to tick the box for Reign. It’s also a pun, this time a shoutout of sorts to Prince. Purple is either merely good, or your favorite color in the whole wide world.”
    AND I DEMAND THE COWARDS OFFER REIGN ON THE GRAND CHEROKEE (non-L of course) RIGHT NOW. AND NOT JUST ON SOME SRT MODEL.
    You cannot fucking take away Sangria Metallic and not give us a replacement, FCAtlantis. You cannot. And offer ALL the colors in monotone, you fucking cowards.

    “You know, these new Jeep colors have me wondering, what colors are in your fleet? While black, white, and gray are all quite popular, it’s nice to see something with a pop of color, or a crazy pearl, or some neat micro flakes.”
    The big money car is black on black on silver. The Integra is, of course, Milano Red just like 95% of them are. The daily Jeep is slightly more special; Mineral Gray Metallic. It’s NOT silver and if you mark it silver, I will correct you. It’s a dark gray with heavy, heavy metalflake. Pretty dignified, IMHO, but too bland still. But I couldn’t find a good one in Midnight Blue Pearl or Deep Beryl Green Pearl.
    But the winner? Chrysler Gunmetal Blue Pearlcoat PC6 (not CC6) over gray cloth. Which is not at all coincidentally the most expensive in materials by a very, very wide margin. PPG base 3631 and an insanely heavy midcoat using huge, huge flakes. The pearl is literally so heavy that it’s often mistaken for a metalflake paint.

    1. This is speculation on my part, but I suspect that the primary driver for going visual camera only is not an executive decree, but burned bridges with suppliers, and then the executive had to spin it.

      1. The (generally reliable) mill said that basically Elongate Moscow decreed that they could do it all with nothing but cameras based on drinking Leather Jacket Daddy’s (Jensen Huang) koolaid and then deciding he was smarter.
        Remember that the whole ‘visual only’ shift came around the same time as they started using NV Tegra hardware. Then in ’19, the Blunderkind got up in front of the crowd and said ‘fuck NV, we developed our own SoC and FSD computer.’

        Yeah. And I’m the Pope. (Well, I mean, I sort of am but I mean the Catholic Pope obviously.)

        1. I do hate that I tried to find a totally logical answer to what this guy does, when I’m also 100% sure that the yoke was designed entirely because he had too many edibles while watching Knight Rider.

      1. Let’s be blunt, my friend.
        The Grand Cherokee has always looked phenomenal in purple, and anyone saying otherwise is wrong.

        1994-1995 Wildberry, 1996 Dark Iris, 1996-1998 Dark Rosewood, 1997-1999 Deep Amethyst, 2000-2004 Sienna Pearl, then the dark years of misery (it’s okay, the greens made up for it somewhat,) then Blackberry in ’11, Plum Crazy for SRTs in ’14, the unparalleled Ultraviolet in ’18 (PHR) also known as Sangria.
        Grand Cherokees just look phenomenal in purples. Brights and darks alike.
        BRING BACK PURPLES, YOU COWARDS!

        1. Mopar did have fun colors. Let’s not kid ourselves, dealers are killing colors and MT.
          Fight me. They want you to walk out the door with the lowest common denominator. Not your preference.

          1. You’re not wrong, but you’re also not entirely right.
            For ’20-’21 WK2’s, FCA only delivered grayscale to dealers, but would accept and deliver any color listed as a standard option. You absolutely could order your Jeep in Sangria or Walnut Brown Metallic or Ivory Pearl Tri-Coat (aka THE GOOD WHITE) or Blue Slade Pearl with an interior in black, gray, or brown.
            Yeah. They even had interior colors, I shit you not.

            But dealers didn’t order them aggressively because they were all a $695+ upcharge on the sticker. That’s 100% on FCA. GM does the same shit; you want any color other than fleet white or black or the cheap silver, that’s gonna cost you. The Diamond White Never-Attempt-To-Match-It Tricoat on my Regal was an $1195 upcharge – in ’15.

            Colors got killed by the beancounters. I can understand extra cost on blues (they are the most expensive paints by materials cost,) and on complex paints like the tri-coats. But $895 for Olive Green Pearl? $695 for Granite Crystal Metallic, a gray? No. Just no.

    2. Taking a sabbatical in the midst of heavy product development was not the best move by Andrej Karpathy. Lack of internal leadership and Elon reaching down to drive things did not help either. I am sure Elon asked him what are you doing for me on this project and Andrej Karpathy quit.

    3. Just to let you know i always enjoy your comments. They’re a mixed bag of mostly good,occasionally great,and sometimes idiotic.
      But always interesting 😀

  12. You have to know Karpathy realizes the Autopilot is a failure and will never work. He’s jumping ship now before the whole thing blows up and makes him a joke and unhireable.

  13. My wife, despite my pleading, went with white. On the other hand I hopefully will never have to part with my 12 Wrangler, which in addition to being manual and having roll-up windows is in the color called Dozer. It’s the orange/yellow of school buses and is incredibly easy to find in parking lots. I’ve often thought of trading it for an automatic (wife can drive stick but doesn’t like the Wrangler trans) but I just can’t fathom the thought of driving something greyscale.

    1. Good for her on disliking the manual. Just cause it has it, doesn’t mean you gotta take it. Bummer though, as my previous comment, a dealer doesn’t want you to get a slow moving MT, what I got on the lot. And just say “there you go, don’t want the stick”.
      Just my $.02

  14. Currently we have two good colors: Bronze Yellow and Forest Service Green. The other two are less interesting, but not unpleasant: a color called Taupe Silver Metallic, and a nice pewter-y dark silver.

    Historically, I’ve always preferred bold colors. I’ve had a yellow Focus, a smurf-blue Escort, and a Coupe deVille and Saturn SC1 that were both very similar shades of royal blue. And my wife has had an Eclipse in a nice cranberry color and a sage-green BMW 325i.

    We’ve also both had a few bright red cars, but it’s not my favorite. I’d rather have silver than red, in most cases, actually. But if a good yellow or blue green is an option, I’m there.

  15. I currently own

    3 Blue
    1 Black
    1 Red
    1 Orange
    1 Green

    Never have owned a yellow car, which is one of my regrets. Hope to rectify that at some point.

    1. I had a yellow 79 Mustang 5.0. Ghia trim. White leather. Was really surprising how well it looked when dirty. Didn’t love leather, but it did pretty well. Yellow seemed to blend in with a lot of dirt. Cop magnet though.
      ????

  16. Regarding Jeep colors, I have to say one of my favorites is Black Forest Green. Which, incidentally, is the color of my JKU. It’s one of the main reasons I bought it.

    1. Black Forest Green is in fact, one of the best damn colors of the Dark Years Where There Was No Purple. Though personally I prefer Deep Beryl Green, neither is easy to find these days.

      1. A man of taste, I see. Yes, Deep Beryl Green was wonderful. As I recall, you could even find it on the Commander. Recalling that, I briefly owned a Commander in Steel Blue Metallic (much more handsome in person) with a camel interior. It was a pretty good rig.

        That said, I also enjoyed the TJ’s iteration of Forest Green. I appreciate the wide variety of colors offered for Wranglers, which makes all the white and black ones so disappointing.

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