Tesla AI Director: ‘I believe ‘Tesla Bot’ is on track to become the most powerful AI development platform’

Tesla’s Director of Artificial Intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, says that he believes ‘Tesla Bot’ is “on track to become the most powerful AI development platform.”

Since Tesla AI Day last year, CEO Elon Musk has been slowly pushing the idea that Tesla is becoming more of an AI/robotics company.

Musk has been boasting about the company’s AI talent, led by Director of Artificial Intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, and believes that the company is in the best position to make advancements in AI due to the real-world applications in its vehicles.

More recently, the CEO even suggested that Tesla could play a role in making Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) a reality through the ‘Tesla Bot’ project, a humanoid robot.

The project has been seen more as a tool to attract AI and robotic talent to the company, and surely Tesla has been in a hiring mode for AI talent since the event and the big reveal of the plans for a robot.

On his LinkedIn page this week, Karpathy shared a new batches of job listings:

– Deep Learning Engineer / Scientist 
– Software Engineer, Deep Learning Infrastructure
– Software Engineer, Deep Learning 
– Software Engineer, Evaluation
– Backend Engineer, AI Tooling
– Frontend Engineer, AI Tooling

The AI expert elaborated on the positions:

“I am hiring Deep Learning Engineers for the Tesla AI team. Strong software engineering is the primary requirement. Except for the scientist role, deep learning interest or knowledge is only a bonus (we will teach you). For the deep learning scientist role any domain outside of computer vision (e.g. speech, NLP, etc.) works great too.”

Karpathy suggested that applicants watch the Tesla AI Day presentation to get an idea of what Tesla is trying to accomplish with AI.

The Tesla Bot project was unveiled at the end of the presentation as sort of a “one more thing” moment by Musk, and the rest of the presenters, including Karpathy, didn’t comment much on it.

In this new post to seek applications from deep learning experts, Karpathy did mention that he believes Tesla Bot is “on track to become the most powerful AI development platform”:

“There is no other organization that vertically integrates, develops, and deploys cutting-edge robotics AI at this scale. Our goal is to improve the safety and comfort of driving along the way to automating transportation with Full Self-Driving. We are also applying everything we’ve learned to our humanoid robot “Tesla Bot”, which I believe is on track to become the most powerful AI development platform.”

The comment is in line with Musk’s recent announcement that Tesla Bot “testing against the real world” will help advance AI technology.

Subscribe to Electrek on YouTube for exclusive videos and subscribe to the podcast.