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Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

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Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#401

Post by rhizome »

aeternum wrote: post #377
yup00 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps me to think in terms of particles and waves. A person is a particle and their influence is a wave. I’m not so sure light is both, but our cognition enables seeing it as both. Mirror neurons fire when we engage a behavior or see it performed. Our culture is built upon a meme repeating protectionist like chants for the rich, deflation for the middle class, and stagnation of the poor. Repeat, fire mirror neuron…

People choose to exchange money for goods and services that improve their life. Rich people generally became rich by directly or indirectly providing goods and services that improved the lives of a great many people.

Rich people generally became rich by inheriting lots of money.

https://ips-dc.org/the_self-made_hallucination_of_americas_r...

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#402

Post by javierluraschi »

ac29 wrote: post #396
javierluraschi wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the latest statement? Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.

Until it actually works, how can you say the hardware is sufficient?

Historically, there have been significant bottlenecks on algorithms, I'd argue software plays a bigger role than hardware; especially during inference.

Going back to AlexNet, while GPUs helped the training process, it included significant software improvements that made a huge difference: training with dropout, convolutional neural networks, using rectified linear units, etc.

Also, training hardware is much more relevant than hardware for inference. Tesla's cars do not include hardware to train the neural network but just for inference. The training hardware is actually a server cluster that Tesla owns. So if hardware is insufficient, Tesla might have to buy a larger training cluster, but not necessarily upgrade the inference hardware.

That say, I do agree that there is some risk in requiring a hardware upgrade for inference, but to me that seems very unlikely.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#403

Post by javierluraschi »

godelski wrote: post #397
javierluraschi wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the latest statement? Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.

Because the claim can't be backed by evidence. There's still a camera alone vs camera +lidar debate. But besides that it's not hard to imagine that the neural net needed to process whatever vision you need isn't powerful enough, so you need next generation GPUs/TPUs/whatever-Us. We just don't know until it's been done. But we know that the more frames you can process per second the better. We do know that the more re…

AI algorithms are split into training and inference.

Training is the process of generating the parameters for the neural network, it usually takes significant resources to train and is a very hard process.

Inference is the process of using a pre-trained neural network to perform predictions.

Tesla's car have hardware to perform inference. From working on the field for several years, I do believe that they have hardware capable of performing inference (driving a car).

However, the hardware that trains the neural network is comprised of hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of GPUs, that hardware lives in Tesla's data centers (or some other cloud provider).

The really hard part of this project is on training, not inference. So while there is some risk that the car (inference) hardware might require an upgrade, this seems very unlikely to me.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#404

Post by rhizome »

xkjkls wrote: post #341
zippergz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the number of companies (from Tesla to Chevrolet) with large volumes actual EVs sold and on the road, I don't see how Nikola has a head start?

Nikola has focused on some substantially different segments of the EV market than they have. Nikola has focused on the trucking market, rather than the consumer car market, which at least is different from many of its competitors

Trucking you can still kill people. You know who I'd like to hear about? The company making self-loading and unloading shipping containers. Now that, I bet, is an achievable goal.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#405

Post by xwdv »

mmdoda wrote: post #296
xwdv wrote: post #232

Been a long turbulent road, lots of interest payments, lots of downvotes, but soon I will be able to close out my massive short position that I opened 10 months ago against this company. Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473631

How much do you stand to make?

In the 6 figures

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#406

Post by [deleted] »

javierluraschi wrote: post #402
ac29 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it actually works, how can you say the hardware is sufficient?

Historically, there have been significant bottlenecks on algorithms, I'd argue software plays a bigger role than hardware; especially during inference. Going back to AlexNet, while GPUs helped the training process, it included significant software improvements that made a huge difference: training with dropout, convolutional neural networks, using rectified linear units, etc. Also, training hardware is much more rele…

[deleted]

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#407

Post by californical »

makeitdouble wrote: post #400
jdminhbg wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure creating a multibillion dollar vaporware fraud shell company and being a dick on Twitter are comparable sins.

From my point of view as a peasant without any shares anywhere, multibillion dollar vaporware companies have very little impact. We could argue this investment could have gone into better companies who could have made the world a better place, but it's purely hypothetical (the money could have gone to a worse company, or political lobbying as well...). Basically, from afar, it's a "rich people lost some money" drama.

That’s about as valid as saying “robbing someone’s house is legal as long as the victim has a high net worth, after all, they can afford it”.

That’s not how laws and society work — theft is theft, no matter who the victim is.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#408

Post by dangrossman »

javierluraschi wrote: post #393
belter wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets see some of the quotes and think if we could get away with it... Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private" After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets: "Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "…

What's wrong with the latest statement? Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.

Since the fall of 2016, Tesla's website has said:

> "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

Yet the original "HW1" computer was replaced by "HW2", which was replaced by "FSD Computer 2.5", which was replaced by "FSD Computer 3".

If you want to activate the Full Self-Driving package today on a Tesla you just bought in early 2019, they'll tell you that your "FSD Computer 2.5" is not capable enough for even today's level 2 autonomy features, you first have to replace it with "FSD Computer 3". And if your car's a bit older, but still sold as "has the hardware needed for full self-driving", you have to pay $1000 for that upgrade before you can pay for the "full self-driving" that isn't self-driving.

How many times does Tesla have to claim the hardware is good enough, but then change their minds a year later, before any reasonable person stops believing them?

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