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Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

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Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#61

Post by dmix »

jamesjyu wrote: post #45
timemachiner wrote: post #7

Since it seems to be a thing to report that X person specializing in machine learning has moved from Y company to Z, it makes me wonder if other areas of computer science is seen as relevant by the general public. One rarely hears Dr. John Doe from Florida State University (or insert non-Standford university here) in Distributed systems has moved from Microsoft Research to NetApp. These are arbitrary names. The point…

You touched on a much wider human phenomenon: attention isn't evenly distributed. The media isn't pushed to report in proportion to an individual's impact. It's guided by trends, aka what people want to read. AI is hot. So therefore there is a huge spotlight on all angles there. You can argue whether that is actually fair (personally, I do think AI is a high beta field). Topics that don't fall under this are regarded…

Media coverage and popularity always works this way. I'm not sure why so many people perpetually can't wrap their head around it. There have been endless comments online where people are offended or surprised that x person is getting attention, but they are just like these other people who are just as good.

But obviously there's more to drawing people's attention than the individual skill or a comparable position at a different company. As you mentioned this top of HN ranking is driven by joining a trendy company, leading a hugely hyped product team (the Tesla automation stuff was on the front page yesterday), and a personal with a really hot skillset.

Combined of course with the usual luck and good timing.

Is it really hard to see how this isn't much more interesting than someone joining a realitively standard branch of Microsoft?

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#62

Post by adamnemecek »

fooker wrote: post #28
pscsbs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Tesla's official statement: "Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best." [0] Chris's response: "Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all. I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!" I don't think I've ever seen a tech company throw an employee under the bus so publicly. I wonder what Lattner did to warr…

Bet Chris Lattner is heading to Google.

If google were to embrace swift that would be spicy.

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#63

Post by dwighttk »

sjg007 wrote: post #54
sidlls wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This same thing is an issue in many scientific disciplines. How many people can even name an area of physics research that isn't particle physics or general relativity, for example?

Biomedical

biomedical physics?

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#64

Post by pgodzin »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #52
pscsbs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equity packages tend to be in the tens of millions for a 4-year vest. Source: I am a manager who has given offers to top-tier ML experts.

Yes, but what is the salary. Tens of millions of stock could end up being worth $0.

At early stage startups, not at public companies like Tesla

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#65

Post by pvg »

chc wrote: post #48
pscsbs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Tesla's official statement: "Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best." [0] Chris's response: "Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all. I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!" I don't think I've ever seen a tech company throw an employee under the bus so publicly. I wonder what Lattner did to warr…

I don't know if there's any better way to downplay a major hire leaving after less than half a year. Everything in those statements is extremely obvious from the circumstances and I can't think of a more cordial way to phrase it.

There are much better standard ways to phrase this and that's precisely why you almost never see it put that way. If for no other reason than that if hiring high-profile talent is something you need to do more than once, you don't want to be publicly suggesting it's somehow their fault when they leave.

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#66

Post by ams6110 »

jfoster wrote: post #32
xyzzy4 wrote: post #23

If A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.

Driving a car is currently specialised, as is folding laundry. The opportunity for autonomous vehicles is clear; you can start with replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income. (likely at somewhat less than 100% efficiency, but who cares because of the massive scale?) The next bit would be converting private trips into automated rides; repl…

> replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income

That's not how it works, because your competitors will undercut you. Then you will undercut them, and continue the race to the bottom until the natural price is reached.

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#67

Post by chc »

babyrainbow wrote: post #49
xyzzy4 wrote: post #23

If A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.

People are downvoting you. But I think this is a really good point...

It isn't, though. The two tasks aren't very similar. It's a pithy put-down if you already don't like the idea of driving AI for other reasons, but nobody who's looking to objectively evaluate a technology for use in cars would say, "Hang on, let's first try to make it fold laundry."

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#69

Post by aerovistae »

awqrre wrote: post #20
nojvek wrote: post #18

I follow Karpathy on Twitter and really enjoy his blog. I do fear that his impact in Tesla could be less than his impact at openai. Openai had some fundamentally great research and ideas. I wish him that best though. Hopefully some of Tesla algorithms will be open source someday and those of us who can't afford a Tesla will be able to use it as well.

Tesla: "All Our Patent Are Belong To You"[0] 0: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

Not relevant. The software may not be patented but also just not published. You would have to reverse engineer it to get at the algorithms, and the car is surely heavily encrypted.

It's like Musk said with SpaceX: publishing patents is just like putting out a recipe book for China.

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