This comes after yesterday's news of Tesla letting 229 people go who were working on Autopilot: https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/12/tesla-laying-off-229-autop....
Data annotation can be cheaply outsourced or scaled up and down without much affecting progress on self-driving. Karpathy leaving says more about that progress to me.
I agree that autopilot by itself, currently is still pretty valuable. What I worry about (and seems to be confirmed) is that Musk misunderstands what’s possible with the current technology and will make outrageous demands from the team, they will fuck up trying to deliver, then the whole thing will become radioactive.
Only if you don't care about quality. In my experience using annotation companies leads to a conflict of interest - annotate more to earn more, or annotate better.