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Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

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231–240 of 327 posts

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#231
post #174
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain the 'back' part of expect them to be back in front of the pack ? As far as I know they've never been in the front of the pack.

With AP1 they were the only company that had anything approaching level 2/3 in a publicly available production vehicle. Google might have been ahead of them but it's hard to tell since all we ever saw were carefully staged demos.

Was it? Weren't things like Distronic+ w/ Steering Assist (and Audi and BMWs equivalents) almost the same thing?

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#233
post #14

Seems to be taking Chris Lattner's place: https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but in the spirit of the high-profile failures (or misuse?) of the Tesla autopilot system, could it be that Chris had a fundamental disagreement with Tesla management over the direction and technical grounding of this feature?

All rank speculation, of course, but maybe he didn't like what was "under the hood" of this feature and how it was being developed and marketed?

Just spectator curiosity, but interesting to ponder none the less.

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#234
post #191
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One eye backed by millions of years of training in depth perception and object recognition... The argument that humans are able to drive with just two cameras and software (brain) is deeply flawed because the brain is highly advanced in areas necessary for driving and Tesla's claim it will replicate that any time soon is absurd. This is why you need additional sensors like LIDAR to alleviate the computational load.

The human brain is a hard AI entity that can think through problems in any generic situation. In self driving AI you are programming the car to do a specific thing. Sooner or later you will run into a situation in which algorithm will panic and can't do much.

Humans cannot and do not "think through problems in any generic situation", and specifically when it comes to driving, they fail with fatal consequences about 100 times every single day in the U.S. alone. Applying such unreasonably high standards (i.e., algorithms that never fail) before we allow self-driving technology to be deployed actually kills people.

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#235
post #215
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I think that depends on what you mean with self-driving. It means a car that doesn't have a steering wheel, brake and accelerator. That kind of a car is quite far.

That's at least 4-5 automotive cycles away, IMO (so 25-30 year away). And that's for the high end. The low end cars are probably 50-60 years away, IMO.

Well, prototypes have already drove millions of miles like that.

(Whether they also had a steering wheel is of course irrelevant, what the parent means is that they can drive without nobody needing to use the steering wheel).

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#236
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, no car manufacturer ships cars equipped with LIDAR. Nor do they seem to have a camera setup as extensive as Tesla. So I fail to see how Tesla has painted itself into a corner. The worst case is, that they are not reaching full autonomy with the current hardware setup. It certainly would be a big marketing blunder if they don't, but if necessary they can add LIDAR to the production, if they choose to…

> no car manufacturer ships cars equipped with LIDAR For love of the god, please do not comment in the public if you do not understand the subject. Take a look at Chrysler + waymo minivans, Volvo + Uber suvs, Mercedes self-driving test cars. They all have lidars.

For the love of god, stop the hyperbole, and try to understand the comments you are answering better.

See how condescending this is?

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#237
post #143
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I kinda tuned out when you mentioned lidar like it's some requirement for autonomous driving. Lidar is AMAZING for giving press demos on sunny days. For the real world with rain, snow, leaves, plastic bags, etc? Useless. The future is radar + cameras + a LOT of software blood, sweat and tears.

That's like saying our eyes are useless because we can't see in the dark.

Not really. Self driving cars should be able to drive in all of those conditions (and one condition might even quickly turn into another, e.g. sunny into rain).

If a technology only helps with some of the cases (e.g. fair weather) and does not work for the others, then there are two cases:

(a) A single replacement technology will be found that works in 100% of cases.

or:

(b) The technology will only be used on the cases it works well, and the other cases will be handled by some alternative technology equally only suited to them.

In the case of (a), Lidar is indeed useless (or at best, only used as a supplementary technology in favourable conditions).

And I fail to see how (b) can be the case -- that is, how there can be another technology that will solve the rain/snow/night driving problem, but which cannot also outperform/replace Lidar for fair weather driving.

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#238
post #167
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I kinda tuned out when you mentioned lidar like it's some requirement for autonomous driving. Lidar is AMAZING for giving press demos on sunny days. For the real world with rain, snow, leaves, plastic bags, etc? Useless. The future is radar + cameras + a LOT of software blood, sweat and tears.

I will take your self driving car seriously if you can drive it in all conditions in India. Until then its just an attempt to make something that breaks at the next unanticipated exception.

Well, most non-Indian drivers also can't make it in "all conditions in India" so that's a moot point.

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is in our wetware. What the brain does with visual input is not just trivial object recognition. It relies on a complex internal model of the world to both augment the object recognition and to sometimes discard the visual data as invalid. So sure, theoretically cameras would be enough. But we're not yet there with software, we can't use the camera input well enough. So if you can side-step the need for not…

> It relies on a complex internal model of the world to both augment the object recognition and to sometimes discard the visual data as invalid. That in particular is what makes the hiring fascinating. This problem is Andrej Karpathy’s expertise[0]. His CNN/RNN designs have reached comfortable results, in particular showcasing the ability to identify elements of a source image, and the relationship between different…

Image captioning is not solved (yet), even if there was a lot of progress made in recent years.

Re: Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

#240
post #176
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will take your self driving car seriously if you can drive it in all conditions in India. Until then its just an attempt to make something that breaks at the next unanticipated exception.

Made me laugh but it's a very true statement. When I was driving whilst holidaying in India I realised that the main rule of the road was "largest vehicle wins"! This actually made for quite an easy to understand system with few questions of whose right of way it was. bike which makes sense because if you're the one who's going to come off worse in an impact then you really want to give way - especially if you have a…

>This actually made for quite an easy to understand system with few questions of whose right of way it was. bike

That doesn't make much sense, because the main (and most common) question would still be between vehicles of the same class: car vs car, and this doesn't solve it.

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