Today, I can only paraphrase George's harsh bulling destructive feedback he gave us on our startup: George, "that wouldn't work" :)
How is that bullying, how is that destructive?
George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
241–250 of 498 posts
Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#242Wow. If he really moves his project to China to take advantage of a lax regulatory environment even though he couldn't pass the scrutiny in the US, he's being very immoral and cavalier about people's lives in China. I don't understand how a startup like Cruise can get past this regulatory hurlde in the US but Hotz can't.
Tell that to the millions of people who have already died because self driving car technology isn't here yet, because the government is stopping it.
A huge proportion of commercial self-driving car projects have senior technical staff who were involved in the DARPA challenges and the surrounding research projects.
It's hard to over-state the role of federal R&D funding in the development of self-driving tech.
Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#243Given how reasonable the NHTSA request looks, to give up so quickly is a bit suspicious. In products like that it is likely that the first 50% looks much more approachable, and then as you try to reach something that can actually be shipped to customers, you have to solve huge problems incrementally, and it is very hard. So looks like a bit of an excuse to stop it: if you have the working thing you try harder before giving up IMHO.
Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an ends justify the means argument. How many lives have been saved TO DATE with self driving cars? How many lives will be saved IN THE FUTURE with self driving cars? What is the acceptable casualty rate to get from where we are now to where you think we will be in the future. Is your family an acceptable casualty? If not, then why is mine?
To estimate your questions, probably no lives have been saved so far through self driving, possibly one extra guy killed in the Telsa crash which you could say was maybe half the systems fault and half the driver not following instructions. In the future, 1.2m people die a year so say self driving reduces that to 0.2m/year, that's a million lives saved per year. You family is thousands of times more likely to die in…
If unnecessary red tape slows things down and causes 100k extra deaths is that ok?
That's an imaginary scenario. You have no idea if that's the way it plays out. Let me give you another scenario: the first self-driving cars kill a bunch of people, and no one wants to touch them for years after they finally become safe; delaying the adoption of cars, and causing millions of additional people to die.
Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#245Something seems fishy to me. Cruise which GM bought for $1B a few months back was working on similar tech. Having only raised $3M he could have EASILY sold his tech/team to Chrysler or Ford or Hyundai, or any other car company for $100M and made his investors super happy and himself very rich. So why "quit" when the feds ask you to deal with regulations that involve passenger safety. Its not like he had to spend $20M…
It is not "similar tech" at all. Yes, both approaches involve some machine learning (which is a huge field). But Cruise's approach is similar to Google/Uber's approach in that it relies on LIDAR. I'd assume (but might be wrong) in that it also relies heavily on premapping, as does the Google/Uber approach.
Comma's approach was complete end-to-end learning with just a single camera (to give you some context, research problems involving two cameras are already considered distinct (but related) research problems from those involving one camera), which is an extremely different approach (the Google/Uber approach can be thought of as more "handcrafted"). From the deep learning researchers I know of there was heavy skepticism of Comma's approach. End to end learning makes for nice demos but is still an active research topic.
From what I can tell, Mobileeye is somewhere in between an end-to-end approach and a handcrafted approach, so I would guess Tesla is similar to Mobileeye on that spectrum.
Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an incredibly reasonable list and something anybody active in the self driving car space should be more than happy to answer in the required detail.
What is your estimate of the required detail? Mine is 100,000 pages. Is your estimate, I don't know, only 100 pages or so? Look at their definition of the word "describe." This letter is designed to kill the company. That is a result I support, but, the people saying "This letter is designed to kill the company" are entirely correct.
The documentation that the NHTSA is requesting are things that would already exist for a properly designed product. They are not asking for it to be generated de novo (and in fact, it cannot be done in that manner if they are operating under a proper design process).
This letter is designed to give pause to (e: previously I wrote "kill") a company operating with complete disregard for proper operations in a regulated industry.
Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#247I love this paragraph of the Request: > The singular includes the plural; the plural includes the singular. The masculine gender includes the feminine and neuter genders; and the neuter gender includes the masculine and feminine genders. "And" as well as "or" shall be construed either disjunctively or conjunctively, to bring within scope of this Special Order all responses that might otherwise be construed to be outs…
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Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#248He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…
Did he delete all of his tweets? Just found his verified account and it's empty.
Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He gets two weeks to provide an enormous amount of detailed information about the product Which either he should have readily available, since he's the creator, or he should have known, since he should be able to demonstrate the safety of the device. > I assume under threat of legal consequences if any of it contains an error Usually you hand over what you have, then you negotiate with the regulator for a time fram…
> > they can and will close down his business if they feel like it > That's the textbook definition of 'regulation'. Right, and it's one of the big problems I have with this form of regulation. I think it violates the idea of "Rule of Law", as opposed to "Rule of Man", which was one of the major factors behind the rise of modern free society.
Can you explain? You seem to be implying that you believe that the NHTSA is capriciously making demands of Comma but not to other similar companies in a similar stage of market-readiness.
Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’
#250I've been thinking for a while now that the main threat to the existence of self-driving cars in the medium-term future is that somebody, in the rush to beat Google, jumping the gun and selling cars that kill people cause Congress to knee-jerk outlaw the whole thing.