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Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

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Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#171

Post by pm90 »

8jef wrote: post #143
ok_dad wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost as if we should invest in public transportation and try to reduce cars rather than make a train car for each individual!

But for people, in the same way as for parcels, power, cable, fiber-optic, there's the last mile problem. Europe has almost solved it with high speed trains and efficient city transit. Then, it solves nothing for all those folks living in rural areas and having to drive f-150s.

> Then, it solves nothing for all those folks living in rural areas and having to drive f-150s.

Fortunately thats not a lot of people.

When electricity was being rolled out, Westinghouse and Edison didn’t bellyache about not being able to provide electricity to rural areas. They electrified all the cities.

Rural areas will just never be able to pay for modern infrastructure. And… thats ok, its not a lot of people.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#172

Post by dahdum »

coenhyde wrote: post #97
Barrera wrote: post #65

The autopilot part of Tesla has never made much sense. Is Tesla the electric car company, or is it the luxury car company? Either way, why does the power train (EV or ICE) come into play at all? Not only that, but Tesla has played the Innovator's Dilemma game from the position of the upstart financially, but targeted the segment of the market that incumbents will defend to the death (luxury cars). Tesla could have go…

The incumbents will defend that market segment to their death indeed. Tesla is pulling a 30% gross margin on their EV's, while legacy auto looses money on their EV's. I don't see legacy auto being capable of refactoring their cars, manufacturing processes and business models fast enough to survive. The fall can cascade quickly, as the incumbents are stuffed with debt. When sales of ICE fall due to the growing EV segm…

> I don't see legacy auto being capable of refactoring their cars, manufacturing processes and business models fast enough to survive.

My take is the opposite. Incumbents already have like 90% of what Tesla had or chose to build from scratch. EV's are not complicated at all compared to ICE, and incumbents have been refining their manufacturing process for decades in a brutally competitive industry.

Unless Tesla can somehow get an effective monopoly on battery tech or FSD, which they are not, they're going to be just another car company. Nothing they can deliver can't be done by others.

Personally I think it's way more likely Waymo or Apple deliver FSD first, with broad industry partnerships wiping out Tesla's advantage.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#173

Post by rsynnott »

electric_mayhem wrote: post #77
clouddrover wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How so? Because they chose to back themselves into that corner. Musk says that Tesla is worth nothing without full self-driving. Certainly it's the only thing left to justify the stock price: https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin... > Which means it's years away and/or "FSD" means "automatic cruise control and lane keep assist" Well, more precisely it means Musk has been lying about it for ni…

Consumer and grid-scale battery storage Solar And I also think they could do some clever stuff with home HVAC, possibly using waste heat from crypto miners as the H. Lastly, afaik they went camera-only in their cheap cars (3/Y) and still use fancy stuff in the S/X. They gave fsd customers new computers once. What’s to stop them from going back to vision+lidar or whatever once the parts are available and retrofitting…

> And I also think they could do some clever stuff with home HVAC, possibly using waste heat from crypto miners as the H.

That doesn't sound... particularly clever. Crypto miners are essentially disposable, with a useful economic lifetime of a couple of years, typically. And they are 100% thermally efficient. Which sounds quite good, until you consider that an air source heat pump is typically around 300% thermally efficient, rising to up to 500% for ground source.

So, once your crypto miner is no longer really making anything (a couple of years), you're left with a really inefficient heating system.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#174

Post by pm90 »

actionablefiber wrote: post #76
highwaylights wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we just, you know, walk a bit more instead? Or even cycle? I hear great things.

The pattern of zoning and development that the U.S. has used for the past 70 years assumes that nobody wants to walk or cycle anywhere and that they feel so strongly about it that they want cities to be built such that people will die if they attempt to do so. I grew up in a neighborhood where the elementary school was about half a mile away... on the other side of a five lane highway with no crosswalk and no sidewal…

This is changing though. Cities are getting bikes and bike lanes. They’re building dense developments close to transit. ebikes + protected bike lanes + TOD might be the solution.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#175

Post by macNchz »

lcnmrn wrote: post #157
codechicago277 wrote: post #3

Tesla has bet the company on robotaxis, but their vision only tech stack doesn’t seem capable of solving it, which is a problem because Tesla has repeatedly promised FSD is right around the corner, or less than a year away. It’s hard to believe Karpathy would step down if he felt they were close to solving the problem anytime soon. This announcement comes after a 4 month sabbatical where Karpathy said he wanted to ta…

The only wait to solve it is to have smart roads. Basically, moving the problem domain from the car to the street.

I've long had this fantasy of a smart road pilot program wherein manufacturers would partner with governments (or toll road owners in some places?) to make self-driving-only smart lanes, where you have to surrender control but the car goes 120+mph. I imagine getting even a handful of popular longer routes enabled for that would be quite popular.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#178

Post by [deleted] »

impulser_ wrote: post #8
codechicago277 wrote: post #3

Tesla has bet the company on robotaxis, but their vision only tech stack doesn’t seem capable of solving it, which is a problem because Tesla has repeatedly promised FSD is right around the corner, or less than a year away. It’s hard to believe Karpathy would step down if he felt they were close to solving the problem anytime soon. This announcement comes after a 4 month sabbatical where Karpathy said he wanted to ta…

Yeah, but Google's vision + lidar tech also doesn't seem any better at solving it either. They have been working on this problem the longest and they aren't even confident enough to produce a product with it. Google is probably the leader in AI and AI research. They are also the leader in data and mapping. They have billions of cash to play with. Yet it seem like they haven't gotten any closer at solving this problem…

[deleted]

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#179

Post by elliekelly »

aeturnum wrote: post #141
dreamcompiler wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber bet the company on robotaxis and lost. Tesla is still building very good cars that happen to not be able to drive themselves. Just like every other car. If they could lose their obsession with self-driving and just focus on their incredible cars, they'd still make money.

They are very much "default alive" BUT I get the sense that a lot of the company's plans and valuation are based on the idea that Tesla will not "just" produce competitive electric cars. They could make money just doing that - but they would never meet the expectations around their company's' trajectory that way and so they would be a "bad" investment (in ROI terms). So I think that everyone who is still working on t…

Their leadership also doesn’t know when to STFU. There was a time when Tesla was _the_ luxury electric vehicle. But Musk is polarizing. He’s isolating formerly loyal customers and more and more compelling alternatives are coming to market every day.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#180

Post by dqpb »

simonswords82 wrote: post #71

Can anybody give insights in to how key this guy is to Tesla. Is it a big deal? What’s his USP?

I think this is one of those things that need to be evaluated retrospectively. How “key” is anyone when their project is yet to be successful?
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