 Tesla's AI director Andrej Karpathy tweeted that he's leaving the company. Tesla hired Karpathy in 2017, shortly after his time as a founding member and a research scientist at OpenAI. Karpathy went on a four-month sabbatical earlier this year, leading some to speculate that he could depart as some former Tesla executives have done. More: - As senior AI director at Tesla, Karpathy led the computer vision team for Autopilot, its driver-assistance technology. The team gathers and labels data and trains neural networks to improve upon Tesla's self-driving technologies.
- On Wednesday, Karpathy tweeted that it was a "great pleasure" to assist Tesla with its goals over five years and a "difficult decision" to leave, without elaborating.
- Since 2017, Autopilot has progressed from keeping Teslas in lanes to navigating city streets, he noted.
- Karpathy said he has no "concrete plans" but will spend time on his passions in AI technical work, open source, and education.
- In response, Elon Musk tweeted to Karpathy, "Thanks for everything you have done for Tesla! It has been an honor working with you."
Related: - Also on Wednesday, records confirmed that Tesla has permanently closed its San Mateo, California, office and has laid off 229 employees there. Many were data annotation specialists on the Autopilot team.
CNBC 
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Greece's data protection authority fined U.S. facial recognition firm Clearview AI $20.1M and ordered it to delete and stop collecting and processing the data of its citizens. Similar sanctions have been made against Clearview by privacy regulators in the U.K., Italy, Australia, and elsewhere. More: - The fine was issued by the Hellenic data protection authority. The Athens-based agency found that Clearview violated various articles of the EU's GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation.
- Its penalty comes after Homo Digitalis, a Greek advocacy group, and others filed complaints against Clearview for "mass surveillance practices through facial recognition."
- Such sanctions have effectively forced Clearview out of those markets, though Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That has argued that the New York-based company is not subject to the EU's legislation.
- The firm continues to sell its AI-based identity-matching service and database of web-scraped photos to U.S. agencies such as law enforcement.
- As part of a recent settlement with the ACLU, it did agree to restrict many of its U.S. services to private businesses and individuals.
BIOMETRIC UPDATE
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 Scientists led by Australia's Curtin University used AI to help identify a Mars crater that ejected a 2.1-billion-year-old meteorite that crashed in the Sahara desert. The famous meteorite, nicknamed Black Beauty, was found in Africa in 2011. It's unique in that it's the only found meteorite from Mars made of breccia, a type of sedimentary rock comprised of angular, broken rock fragments cemented together. More: - Before the research, scientists didn't know the meteorite's origin site. To determine this, they developed a machine learning algorithm to analyze the millions of craters on the Martian surface, based on high-res photos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.
- Using both the AI software and a supercomputer, they found and listed around 90 million craters. Further research enabled them to narrow down the list of candidates, eventually singling out one crater with the same properties as Black Beauty.
- That crater, named Karratha after the Australian city, is 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) wide. Tracing Black Beauty to that crater could generate new information about Mars' history, according to scientists.
- Their study was published in Nature Communications. The researchers hope to apply the same technique to find other crater ejection sites of the 300+ Martian meteorites discovered on Earth.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
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On Wednesday, the U.S. and Israel announced a technology partnership that will focus on trustworthy AI, climate change solutions, pandemic preparedness, and tech ecosystems. The countries' national security councils will lead the discussions to promote and protect emerging and critical technologies, according to a White House statement. More: - In the artificial intelligence category, talks will center on challenges to support "cutting-edge AI" in transportation, medicine, and agriculture.
- The countries will focus on tools for trustworthy AI, managing risk, and enhancing privacy, according to the White House.
- Officials are set to meet annually, with the first meeting scheduled in the fall.
- The announcement came hours before President Biden landed in Israel to begin a four-day trip to the Middle East. It includes stops in Israel and Saudi Arabia to focus on national security, the ongoing global oil crisis, and other matters.
Zoom-out: - In September, U.S. Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) introduced a bill to create a U.S.-Israel AI Research and Development Center.
- The bill, a companion to a Senate bill introduced in June 2021, would earmark $10M a year over the next five years for the center.
- It would focus on R&D in machine learning, object detection, image classification, speech recognition, and natural language processing and help counter China's growing AI advancements, supporters say.
THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
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Tecton raised $100M to support its platform that speeds up the launch of machine learning applications. The startup says its ML feature platform allows data scientists to turn raw data into production-ready "features," or predictive variables that feed machine-learning models. Its platform automates feature building based on real-time data sources. More: - SF-based Tecton was founded by the developers of Uber's Michelangelo machine learning platform.
- A commercial version of that technology became Tecton, which launched from stealth in 2020.
- The new funding will allow Tecton to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams and strengthen its feature platform for ML, in addition to its "Feast" open-source feature store.
- Kleiner Perkins led the latest Series C round, with participation from data lakehouse platform developer Databricks, cloud data firm Snowflake, and others. Tecton has partnerships with Databricks and Snowflake.
- In addition to the funding, Tecton announced that its annual recurring revenue nearly tripled from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2022. It said its customer base grew five-fold in the last 12 months.
- The startup has raised $160M to date.
TECHCRUNCH
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🍋 FRESH FUNDING 🍋 - Elaia (France), VC firm that invests in AI, data science, cybersecurity, and healthcare startups: $77M fund led by BNP Paribas, L’Oréal,VINCI Concessions, Inria, Bpifrance for the Fonds National d’Amorçage 2, Covéa Finance, and Malakoff Humanis.
- Scale Computing (Indianapolis), a cloud-based software solution for edge computing: $55M.
- Deci (Israel), software company that enables researchers to use AI at a lower cost than the standard: $25M B round led by Insight Partners with participation from Square Peg, Jibe Venture, Emerge, ICON, and Fort Ross Ventures.
- Sortera Alloys (Fort Wayne, Ind.), AI-based industrial scrap metal sorting and recycling company: $10M led by Assembly Ventures, participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Novelis.
- Deshe Analytics (Tel Aviv, Israel), AI-based financial research: $6.5M Seed led by Group 11, participation from Psagot Investment House, Avishai Abrahami, Nir Zohar.
For the latest on AI startup funding and more in the VC community, subscribe to our newsletter, Inside Venture Capital.
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 |  | Beth is a writer and analyst at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily tech news. Since starting work at Inside, she has covered various topics including virtual reality, drones, and e-commerce. Prior to that she was a public policy and investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic, where she won a Pulitzer Prize nomination and First Amendment Award for reporting on the rising costs of pensions. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. |   | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 Ford. | |
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