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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

#441

Post by tsimionescu »

electriclove wrote: post #340
xkjkls wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Elon Musk is obviously different? He's definitely had many events where he has lied about aspects of his business. You could argue that it doesn't matter now that he has built something real, but that's down to a lot of luck, not ethical backbone.

Musk has built many things over the past Many years. Though he may talk about even more, bringing EVs to the masses and creating reusable rockets is something he deserves full credit for. It has nothing to do with ethics. A rational person would not equate Musk with Milton.

The fact that Tesla is not entirely vapourware doesn't mean that Musk hasn't lied or even committed fraud to get here. Lying to investors to fund a billion dollar company that is actually worth a few hundred million is not that different from funding one that is worth 0 dollars.

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

#442

Post by simondotau »

ethbr0 wrote: post #84
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?

Popular opinion around EV tech is approaching PowerPC-era Mac apologists. "Yes, it's less performant, but it has {insert special, unmeasurable and/or unproven magic here}."

That's not really a good analogy. Every interesting technology has its share of unhinged fanpeople. And it's not interesting to judge a technology by the behaviour of its fans.

There's only one real Achilles heel of EV tech and it's a big one—the limited supply (and the consequent high price) of batteries. If there was an unlimited supply of battery cells at a low price, EVs would be generally superior to comparable ICE vehicles in core objective metrics.

There are numerous secondary limitations of EVs, such as the availability of charging facilities where they are needed. But this class of problem is directly aligned with uptake. They solve themselves as more EVs are adopted and market share increases.

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

#443

Post by simondotau »

dangrossman wrote: post #440
simondotau wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the GP quoted Elon saying this in fall 2016 then you would have an entirely valid point. But the GP did not do this. The GP dated the quote as being made in 2020, when all new cars did in fact contain HW3.

The quote is not "all Tesla cars have HW3", it's "all Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving". He said that same thing about HW2 and about HW2.5. There are no self-driving Tesla robotaxis running any computer version. It was as wrong to say it in 2020 as it was in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Maybe at next month's "Tesla AI Day" (not to be confused with 2019's "Tesla Autonomy Day") he'll debut…

You appear to be misquoting. Can you please cite this 2020 quote verbatim and in context? If you can, and the context is consistent with what you have inferred, I will retract everything and offer my most generous and profuse apology.

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

#444

Post by dangrossman »

simondotau wrote: post #443
dangrossman wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote is not "all Tesla cars have HW3", it's "all Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving". He said that same thing about HW2 and about HW2.5. There are no self-driving Tesla robotaxis running any computer version. It was as wrong to say it in 2020 as it was in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Maybe at next month's "Tesla AI Day" (not to be confused with 2019's "Tesla Autonomy Day") he'll debut…

You appear to be misquoting. Can you please cite this 2020 quote verbatim and in context? If you can, and the context is consistent with what you have inferred, I will retract everything and offer my most generous and profuse apology.

The quote is from further up this thread we're in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28002731

It's verbatim from Elon Musk on Autonomy Day 2019, per this article:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-dri...

This is the same event where he promised a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020.

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

#445

Post by sellyme »

californical wrote: post #407
makeitdouble wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even ignoring the extremely explicit Robin Hood example that's already been pointed out, there's a hell of a lot of fiction centered around going to the lair of a dragon that does nothing but hoard gold, and killing it. Possibly you missed the subtext when reading those stories, but the gist of it is that society is totally fine with not caring about an extremely rich person losing a tiny fraction of their wealth.

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

#446

Post by godelski »

javierluraschi wrote: post #403
godelski wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hardwa…

Thanks? I'm a ML researcher. I thought the comment about ViTs would have been a dead giveaway. Is this nerd-splaining? Because it is really demeaning and you're missing the entire point.

While you're right, inference is not training but accuracy and inference speed is still important and hardware dependent. YOLO still can be faster and more accurate. Everything I said still holds true. You want to do inference on larger images because larger images have more information. More information helps you get better accuracy. You want bigger networks because bigger networks correlate strongly with higher accuracy. If you read any object detection paper you will see different sized models showing these tradeoffs. You want faster hardware because you still want your algorithms to be fast. Inference is still done in the car. Better hardware still makes all that perform better.

> The really hard part of this project is on training, not inference.

If you pay attention to the YOLO series or other real time object detection you will know that inference is still something being worked on. Inference speed matters. Throughput (different metric) matters. Hardware helps with both even if we use the same pretrained network. A network will have faster inference and higher throughput on an Ampere card than on a Kepler. So I'm not sure what you're debating here, it really feels like you're just trying to tell me you know machine learning but missed strong clues that you're talking to someone else who is aware.

TLDR: hardware still matters.

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

#447

Post by wbl »

slownews45 wrote: post #386
xkjkls wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His twitter post was clear, he was "considering" taking TSLA private. $420 funding secure indicates he already had financing ready. Why has this mystery funder never materialized. > Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for This is hugely problematic as a response. Elon Musk's behavior is unethical whether Tesla stock went up or down. The stock price should not be used as justification for pre…

No one has been confused I don't think. I saw the considering the $420 buyout, I took it to mean just that. The short sellers around tesla have been pathetic. Note I don't own any tesla stock, but the short seller hype train is just ridiculous around tesla. How there has been no action there is mind boggling. He's a crazy guy willing to take crazy risks - look at SpaceX -> they are operating COMPLETELY outside all no…

Funding secure means one and only one thing: that he had secured funding. He didn't have it. He lied.

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

#448

Post by godelski »

javierluraschi wrote: post #412
dangrossman wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-D…

Replacing hardware does not make old hardware incapable of FSD. To give you an example, ImageNet for image classification required for many years a descent computer and GPU to run inference. Today, an improved version called MobileNet, runs in phones with no GPU from advancements in AI training with half-precision and why not. So, how can we be so sure that FSD can't EVER be ported back to HW1?

> MobileNet

Okay, compare accuracy of MobileNet to ViT. ViT has 90.45% accuracy and 1.843Bn parameters and MobileNet has 79% with 5.47M parameters (2020, v3 is 75% with 5.4). [0]

These two networks are nowhere near equal. If you could put ViT on a phone and run real-time inference you would. But you can't, so you take a major cut in performance to get what you can.

There are multiple metrics you need to look at when evaluating networks. "Being able to perform on a dataset" is not even that useful of one.

[0] Have fun https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imag...

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

#449

Post by tomp »

itsoktocry wrote: post #289
skystarman wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty to criticize Tesla and Elon about, to be sure, but a lot of Elon's predictions have turned out to be true at least when it comes to passenger vehicles. What they've done with the EV market for consumers is nothing short of remarkable. Obviously Solar and Semi are a different matter. Tesla was run by a technical founder (Stanford PhD pedigree fwiw) that knows his shit (though a bit crazy and prone to exaggerati…

> Tesla was run by a technical founder (Stanford PhD pedigree fwiw) that knows his shit (though a bit crazy and prone to exaggeration and hyperbole) Musk was not a Stanford PhD nor a founder, if that's who you are referring to. If you can point me to any evidence of either that doesn't come from him, I'll be happy to stand corrected. > He even hired his brother--a guy who used to install carpets--to run Nikola's hydr…

According to Wikipedia, Musk was accepted to a Stanford PhD. As acceptance is the hardest, most competitive and therefore most distinguished part of any elite university, that in itself is a meaningful signal. Parent poster also never said he has a PhD, but that he has the pedigree, i.e. got through the hardest part.

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

#450

Post by godelski »

javierluraschi wrote: post #416
cat199 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, you're saying it doesn't work then?

Correct! I'm saying FSD only works on 90%-99% of cases, which is currently insufficient to be actually considered FSD. Keyword, currently. However, I'm NOT stating that this won't ever work. I do believe that FSD will work in the future. Are there risks? For sure. But I'm very optimistic. I'm trying to communicate that, even with current in-car hardware, this should be sufficient. Why? Cause driving the car with a ne…

> I'm saying FSD only works on 90%-99% of cases

This is an extremely bold claim. You're also ignoring the fact that driving is an extremely heavy tailed distribution. We know that both processing heavy tailed distributions is difficult (not training, but pre-processing) as well as we see a strong correlation between larger networks and performance on heavy tailed distributions (more normal like distributions can get away with substantially smaller networks). But larger networks means more MACs. More MACs means slower inference. There's still a tradeoff between accuracy and speed. In driving you need both.

> Are you really saying that FSD will never work?

No one here is saying that. Everyone here is calling you out on your BS that we _know_ that FSD will work on _current_ hardware. We don't _know_ that. Maybe it will, but it's not a pony I'm willing to put money on.

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