I think Karpathy at Tesla has basically unlimited funding, Tesla is developing custom hardware. They've already deployed said hardware in the wild, and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving. We also don't know what his pay situation is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had multimillion dollar bonuses tied to various milestones. I know if I were Elon Musk, I wouldn't want to lose the guy.
So sure, he could leave, but to do what? To start building something similar from scratch somewhere else? He could go to Waymo to find that he went from being the project leader to an underling, and that Waymo is not using the approach he wants to use (he designed the Tesla project, and it's close to pure deep learning). IMO, unless something goes really wrong at Tesla, he will stay, because they're so close to success, surely he wants to see what happens, because the payout will be huge.
So sure, he could leave, but to do what? To start building something similar from scratch somewhere else? He could go to Waymo to find that he went from being the project leader to an underling, and that Waymo is not using the approach he wants to use (he designed the Tesla project, and it's close to pure deep learning). IMO, unless something goes really wrong at Tesla, he will stay, because they're so close to success, surely he wants to see what happens, because the payout will be huge.