229 Employees From Tesla' Autopilot Team Fired
In its latest spree of layoffs, Tesla confirmed that it will fire 229 more of its employees working from the San Mateo, California office. The Elon Musk-owned electric vehicle company revealed the information through a regulatory filing.
These employees worked in the company’s Autopilot team. The San Mateo, California office had about 276 workers, and according to a TechCrunch report, the remaining 47 workers may be sent to work in Tesla’s Buffalo Autopilot office.
The workers who were fired were mostly low-skilled and had low-wage jobs, such as Autopilot data labelling, which involves determining if Tesla’s algorithm identified an object well or poorly.
The report further added that these layoffs are a part of the 10 per cent workforce reduction, which founder Musk had announced earlier this year.
Tesla’s director of AI, Andrej Karpathy, who led the Autopilot vision team, also quit without revealing the reasons behind his decision. Karpathy said that he has no concrete plans for what's next but looks to spend more time revisiting his long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education.
Musk had informed the employees about the layoffs via email. The billionaire said in the email there will be job cuts and he has a "super bad feeling" about the economy as well. Musk also noted in the email that the company has paused “all hiring worldwide”.
Tesla fired some of its employees without giving them a 60-day notice, which violates the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. This attracted a lawsuit, which was filed by two former employees who were fired in mid-June.
