Tesla has destroyed the Autopilot data annotation team, cutting off over 200 people and closing the San Mateo, California headquarters where they worked. Sources who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity confirmed the layoffs, which were initially reported by Bloomberg.
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk earlier noted that the business might lay off up to 10% of its staff in the following three months.
- Elon Musk has closed a California facility dedicated to teaching AI software
Tesla has laid off 200 additional staffers who were working on the company’s Autopilot driver-assistant system in a new wave of layoffs. Tesla has also shuttered its office in San Mateo, California. Cost-cutting is being cited as one of the causes for the new layoffs. Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously stated that the business might lay off up to 10% of its staff in the following three months.
According to a Reuters story, one of the employees who were laid off told the news agency about the layoff. He also mentioned that the majority of those put off were hourly workers. The laid-off employee further stated that the impacted employees at the satellite office had previously been advised that they would be relocated to a Palo Alto location in phases beginning this month once the San Mateo lease expired. However, the majority of the employees were laid off on Tuesday. “It was absolutely numbing,” he said. “Yeah, we’re absolutely surprised; we’re definitely taken aback.”
Musk notified staff of the layoffs through email. He stated in the email that there will be layoffs and that he had a “very negative feeling” about the economy. Musk also mentioned in the email that the business had halted “all recruiting globally.”
In response to Tesla’s recent layoffs, Raj Rajkumar, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of electrical and computer engineering, stated, “Tesla is definitely on a cost-cutting spree. This (employee decrease) most certainly suggests that the firm had a difficult 2Q 2022 owing to the Shanghai closure, raw material pricing, and supply chain issues.”
Musk too has requested that Tesla staff return to their workplace. When the employees arrive at the office, they face a new horror. When they returned to the workplace after Musk’s severe warning, there was no place to sit, no parking spaces, and poor wifi that hampered their work. According to The Information, Tesla employees who returned to the company’s Fremont, California headquarters claimed that there was no space to sit when they entered the office building. Employees were unable to park their vehicles. Some of those who did receive a work desk had to cope with poor wifi, which hampered their productivity. The situation deteriorated to the point that managers were forced to ask staff to work from home till the problems were resolved.
