Tesla Inc laid off hundreds of workers on its Autopilot team as the electric-vehicle maker shuttered a California facility, people familiar with the matter said.
Surprisingly, the majority of those who were let go were hourly workers, the people said.
As recently as last week, Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk had outlined plans to cut 10 percent of salaried staff, but said he would be increasing hourly jobs.
Photo: Reuters
Teams at the San Mateo office were tasked with evaluating customer vehicle data related to the Autopilot driver-assistance features and performing so-called data labeling.
Many of the staff were data annotation specialists, all of which are hourly positions, one of the people said.
About 200 workers were let go in total, the people said.
Prior to the cuts, the office had about 350 employees, some of whom were already transferred to a nearby facility in the past few weeks.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tesla is trimming its ranks after a surge in hiring in the past few years. The company, now based in Austin, Texas, had grown to about 100,000 employees globally as it built new factories in Austin and Berlin.
Musk caught workers by surprise earlier this month when he said layoffs would be necessary in an increasingly shaky economic environment.
He said in an interview with Bloomberg that about 10 percent of salaried employees would lose their jobs over the next three months, although the overall headcount could be higher in a year.
The electric-vehicle market leader’s downsizing efforts have focused on areas that grew too quickly. Some human resources workers and software engineers are among those who have been laid off, and in some cases, the cuts have hit employees who had worked at the company for just a few weeks.
Those affected by the latest move worked on one of the higher-profile features in Tesla vehicles.
In job postings, Tesla has said that labeled data is the “critical ingredient for training powerful Deep Neural Networks, which help drive the Tesla vehicles autonomously.”
Staffers in Buffalo, New York, and San Mateo spent hours labeling images for road vehicles and the environment they navigate, such as street signs and traffic lanes.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS