That's pretty much a totally different category of employee, though:
"Tesla is laying off 229 data annotation employees who are part of the company’s larger Autopilot team [...] Most of the workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-wage jobs, such as Autopilot data labeling"
Data annotation can be cheaply outsourced or scaled up and down without much affecting progress on self-driving. Karpathy leaving says more about that progress to me.
On top of that, this might signal that Tesla is confident enough in their autolabeling that they no longer need as much human intervention. This job title theoretically should be temporary.
I agree that autopilot by itself, currently is still pretty valuable. What I worry about (and seems to be confirmed) is that Musk misunderstands what’s possible with the current technology and will make outrageous demands from the team, they will fuck up trying to deliver, then the whole thing will become radioactive.
> Data annotation can be cheaply outsourced or scaled up
Only if you don't care about quality. In my experience using annotation companies leads to a conflict of interest - annotate more to earn more, or annotate better.
Data annotation can be cheaply outsourced or scaled up and down without much affecting progress on self-driving. Karpathy leaving says more about that progress to me.