Elon Musk: Jim Keller is pursuing his personal dream to redesign how server architecture works

During the controversial first-quarter earnings call from Tesla, CEO Elon Musk answered a question about the departure of chip architect Jim Keller. As you may know, Keller worked on AMD's Zen architectures before he took up a job at Tesla to work on the firm's AI chip, and now he's leading silicon engineering at Intel.

Here's what Musk had to say about the departure of Keller, and how it impacts Tesla's chip project:

Romit Jitendra Shah - Nomura Instinet
Okay. Okay. As a follow-up, could you just comment on Jim Keller's departure? A highly respected chip architect. What does it say, if anything, about the development of Tesla's custom silicon and autopilot? Thank you.

Elon Reeve Musk - Tesla, Inc.
Well, Jim's a great guy, and there's sort of a career he wanted to pursue for a long time which is to kind of redesign how server architecture works. Something that I find a little bit (32:25) interesting, but it's something that Jim – it's been a sort of personal dream that (32:27) Jim's to do and that's why he went to Intel.

The design of the Tesla hardware is primarily led by Pete Bannon, I should be clear (32:47). The lead designer of that is Pete Bannon, who is still with Tesla. And, of course, Andrej Karpathy is head of our AI team. So, we don't plan to hire a replacement for Jim's position.