On April 26, Tesla’s director of automatic driving, Jim Keller, announced his departure. Jim Keller is a chip god and was the chief architect of AMD's K8. He designed A4 and A5 mobile processors at Apple.
For Tesla, the departure of Jim Keller may directly lead to the bankruptcy of the 'chips' initiative. Jim Keller has been responsible for the development of the Autopilot system and Tesla's own autopilot chips since 2016. Last year, Musk was at NIPS. The conference stated publicly that Jim Keller will be responsible for the development of a dedicated AI chip. At that time, Musk was boasting: We think this will be the best chip in the world.
The departure of the head of chip R&D may force Tesla to rely on Nvidia for a long time in chip R&D. What's more, Tesla doesn't seem to be good at 'coincidence' with its chip suppliers. In 2016, Tesla In the fatal accident, Autopilot used the Mobieye chip. After the accident, Tesla and Mobieye both accused the other party of being responsible for the car accident. After the contract period between the parties was full, Mobieye announced that it would no longer be Tesla's Autopilot Autopilot System. provide technical support.
After that, Musk turned to cooperate with Nvidia, and later had his own plans to develop chips. Do not know whether it was a pure coincidence. On the day Muskner stated that he had developed chips, Nvidia also released 'TITAN V' PC on NIPS. GPU. This is regarded as a signal that both parties 'break up'.
In addition, since April 2017, Tesla has experienced frequent turnover of senior executives. According to statistics, at least five senior executives have announced their departure. They are:
• In February 2017, Jon McNeill, President of Tesla Global Sales & Services, left;
• In March 2017, Tesla’s chief accounting officer Eric Branderiz and Tesla’s vice president of finance, Susan Repo, left the company.
• In June 2017, Jim Keller's 'former', former Apple software expert Chris Lattner, left Tesla and worked only for Tesla for six months;
• In September 2017, Diarmuid O'Connell, Tesla's vice president of business development, announced his departure.
Despite this, it is not wise to sing Tesla. It is difficult to find a suitable candidate to succeed Jim Keller. It will take some effort to repair the relationship with the supplier. However, with the improvement of production capacity and effective support in the financial sector, Tesla still maintained strong momentum in the next development. Even the excitement of the Tesla booth alone from the Beijing auto show is not difficult to see, the market and consumers are still happy to see Tesla's success.