Andrej Karpathy responds to 'Tesla should remove Elon Musk as CEO'

the big thing that I took away from Andre karpathy dissecting what Elon Musk does how he runs his companies is this he says he runs his companies in an incredibly Unique Style and that analysts just don't understand this they don't understand that Elon musk's way of running a company is entirely different people think you know if we get rid of el musk as the CE of Tesla that would be a good thing that' be great because then we wouldn't have to deal with the dramas of Elon Musk Tesla would then be able to you know achieve amazing things without him it would be perfect to be a better situation but Kathy says no actually you don't understand you really don't understand the difference between Elon Musk and a regular CEO Andre karpathy one of Elon musk's most respected employees at Tesla the former director of Tesla's artificial intelligence basically everything that they were doing to try to make full self-driving work and the man who authored and was the primary instructor of the very first deep learning course in the United States well he has left Tesla but he had something to say he had something to say about Elon Musk he was asked in an interview only a couple of weeks ago what is the secret to Elon M's success uh yeah so I would say definitely Elon runs this company is an extremely unique style I don't actually think that people appreciate how unique it is you sort of like even read about it some what you don't understand it I think it's like even hard to describe I don't even know where to start but it's like a very unique different thing like I I like to say that he runs the biggest startups so he likes very small strong highly technical uh teams uh so that's number one so I would say at companies by default they sort of like the teams grow and they get large Elan was always like a force against growth I would have to work and expend effort to hire people I would have to like basically plead to hire people um and then the other thing is at big companies usually you want um it's really hard to get rid of low performers and I think Elon is very friendly to by default getting getting rid of low performers so I actually had to fight for people to keep them on the team uh because he would by default want to remove people and so uh that's one thing so keep a small strong highly technical team uh no middle management that is kind of like uh non-technical for sure yes and rather than trash musk well this is what he said it was actually really interesting hello my friends welcome to the channel I'm Sam Evans you're watching the electric Viking it's great to see you thank you for tuning in Andre karpathy he is highly highly respected he's a Slovak Canadian computer scientist who served as the Director of artificial intelligence and autopilot at Tesla he co-founded and Fir formerly worked on open AI where he specialized in deep learning and computer vision he left Tesla because to be honest the guy was he's worked out he worked so hard for so many years is that um he decided it was time for a break but he was just asked the question what's the secret to elma's success and you know what he and musk they still get along I mean a lot of people who work for Elon Musk they get a bit burnt out everything's a bit too much for them Kathy well this is what he said he said there's a few reasons to Elon Musk success one of them he tells staff at Tesla Elon Musk literally says to staff of Tesla if you're in a meeting and you're not contributing or you're not learning anything leave leave what's the point of being there and you know what I've always felt the same way through my life I was involved in meetings in with work or various places that I've been at various positions that I've held and I've thought to myself what a waste of time this meeting is what am I doing here this is I could be actually being productive I could be doing things I've had this discussion with so many people and they agree Andre says that that's what El says you know he doesn't like stagnation he doesn't like to look for it to look that way he doesn't like large meetings he always encourages people to like leave meetings if they're not being useful uh so actually do see this or you know it's a large meeting and some if you're not contributing and you're not learning just walk out and this is like fully encouraged and I think this is something that you don't normally see big meetings generally big meetings are a waste of time now Kathy says one of the big secrets to Tesla's success is this small teams small teams where a very small number of intelligent people are contributing are basically creating something great and he he's saying you know what the the the concept of having you know General Motors and Ford having these huge teams working on something generally a lot of people are there and they're not really contributing to anything it's really the 8020 principle the 8020 principle right the 8020 rule what is the 8020 rule well the 8020 rule is a familiar saying that asserts that 80% of outcomes or outputs specifically in Tesla's case outputs result from 20% of all causes or inputs in other words basically in business a goal of the 8020 rule is to identify inputs that are potentially the most productive and make them the priority for instance once managers identify factors that are critical to the company's success they should give those factors the most Focus the 8020 rule means often in a workplace you'll find 20% of staff are contributing to 80% of the outcomes and Kathy says that when they wanted more staff musk drove them to work harder and more efficiently and to really prove that they needed that extra staff member he says that one of the big key reasons for My Success across various businesses is having small dedicated teams work on one challenging task so he likes very small strong highly technical uh teams uh so that's number one so um I would say at companies by default they sort of like the teams grow and they get large Elon was always like a force against growth I would have to work and expend effort to hire people I would have to like basically plead to hire people um and the other thing is that big companies usually you want um it's really hard to get rid of low performers and I think Elon is very friendly to by default getting getting rid of low performance so I actually had to fight for people to keep them on the team uh because he would by default want to remove people and so uh that's one thing so keep a small strong highly technical team uh no middle management that is kind of like uh non-technical for sure Kathy said he had to fight to keep people on the team in Tesla in various places for example in his team musk was saying who's the weakest link who is who is part of the 80 who do we get rid of who do we get rid of who do we get rid of and kath is like no no no we need them we need them we need them uh mus saying well clearly some of you are producing more than others who's producing more this is a very challenging environment to be in this means the A+ performance the A+ performers well they stay there the weak links they get well they get rooted out and fired and that's what musk is good at getting rid of the weak links in the team I mean Kathy says musk would by default want to remove people which is very interesting when you consider the fact Tesla has hired thousands and thousands and I mean literally tens of thousands of Staff since musk has been there but his default is to want to remove people who aren't performing and Kathy says you know what musk believes that middle management is generally a waste it's just um people who are soaking up useless positions who don't really contribute anything now one other thing that mus clearly likes and this does give us an insight into Elon musk's personality his personality is driven by chaos and drama I'm not like that at all I I I couldn't handle that but musk likes to come into a workplace and it needs to look like something's happening he wants to see people um doing things actively doing things he wants to see the appearance of activity and progress and if there's none of that he starts to get concerned he starts to PO potentially create drama in order to have the appearance or have the situation where everyone's reacting to something they need deadlines that's the reason mus create deadlines these crazy deadlines that people generally can't meet in order to drive that activity in order to drive people to work hard and to do things that they probably think is beyond their own capacity now Kathy goes on to say that Elon Musk has a large hammer and he's very willing to exercise it within the organization and um and also just like his large hammer and his willingness to exercise it within the organization so maybe if he talks to the engineers and they bring up that you know what's blocking you okay I I just I don't have enough gpus to run my thing and he's like oh okay and if he see if he hears that twice he's going to be like okay this is a problem so like what is our timeline and when when you don't have satisfying answers he's like okay I want to talk to the person in charge of the GPU cluster and like someone dials the phone and he's just like okay double the cluster right now like let's let's have a meeting tomorrow from now on send me daily updates until cluster is H twice the size and then they kind of like push back and they're like okay well we have this procurement set up we have this timeline and Nvidia says that we don't have enough GP gpus and it will take six months or something and then you get a rise of an eyebrow and then he's like okay I want to talk to Jensen and then he just kind of like removes Bott neck so I think the extent to which he's extremely involved and removes bot neck and applies his hammer I think is also like not appreciated so Kathy said musk would meet with him in person he'd say What's blocking you from six From Success what do you need what's the what's the number one thing stopping you Kath would say well I need this and musk would say okay let's make that happen Kath would say mus would then say to him what else is there is there anything else that's blocking you from success what is the biggest what you know what are the biggest things C say well actually there's there's another thing I need someone to to to do this m say okay done very very quick decision making that's a lot like guess who byd Wang Chan Fu he's very similar the CEO the founder of byd makes fast decisions some of the're wrong some some not going to be the perfect decision but he makes quick decisions and moves at a rapid pace so even though people a lot of people think that IL mus doesn't really do much at Tesla it's not actually true Kathy says that that's not the case at all that he's very very Hands-On and involved and although there may be some weeks and periods of time where musk is not at Tesla he might be at SpaceX for example when he is there he's extremely driven to actually individually take responsibility CEOs at other companies CEOs they rely on their managers to tell them what's going on but M doesn't really do that he says what's going on and then he actually pinpoints uh exactly the pain points he'll he'll say get me this person on the phone he's doing this I need to speak to him immediately and musk actually appears to be intelligent enough to work out ways to find solutions to problems that even Tesla's Engineers may not have figured out themselves so Kathy and musk have a a very high level respect for each other but you can see Kathy um probably was a bit burned out from M's approach it is demanding it is challenging to deal with this for a long period of time some people can handle this for for I a year only a year have 6 months some people can handle it for 10 or 20 years really depends on your personality

Channel: The Electric Viking

Views: 37,388

Keywords: electricvehicles, evs, #electriccars, electricfuture

Id: 2ZTtBYDMGPc

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2024