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Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

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Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#261

Post by giantrobot »

hedora wrote: post #95
qaq wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Tesla is dominant player in luxury segments they have products in

Analysts suggest that, while they may still be the market leader in EVs, by 2025 they're looking at a decline from today's 70-75% market share to 11-20%: https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilwinton/2022/07/11/ev-makers... This meshes pretty well with them not having anything in the compact, pickup truck, offroading/camping segments (luxury, or not). They also don't have any commercial vehicles like delivery vans. All of…

Fleet sales is a place I see demand seriously ticking up for BEVs. Even modulo today's price gouging on gas, gas prices are only going to increase over time and many countries/states are increasing emission regulations.

In California at least there's a significant percentage of fleet vehicles that are HEVs or low emission ICEs like CNG. Fleet edition BEVs will sell like gangbusters here (if they're not already).

I don't see Tesla really able to target the fleet vehicle market. They're currently geared entirely for consumer sales and then only up market consumer sales. Fleet sales aren't flashy or exciting but they're reliable income generators for car companies.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#262

Post by Animats »

dekhn wrote: post #256
Animats wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo and Cruise routinely have driverless cars on city streets. In California, all collisions, however minor, have to be reported, and DMV posts them on their web site.[1] Most are very minor. Here's a more serious one from last month: " A Cruise autonomous vehicle ("Cruise AV") operating in driverless autonomous mode, was traveling eastbound on Geary Boulevard toward the intersection with Spruce Street. As it appro…

I think the way I would say it is, after a few tens to hundreds of thousands of such events, we'll be able to estimate the parameters of the human preference functions associated with a non-fatal trolley problem (the real trolley problem is irrelevant to the car ML folks, they are not aiming to maximize global utility) and that will help guide our confidence in rolling out more. For all the woe and gloom in the news…

I've been reading those DMV reports for years, and there are clear patterns which repeat. One is where an autonomous vehicle started to enter an intersection with poor sight lines to the cross street. Sensing cross traffic, it stopped, and was then rear-ended by a human-driven vehicle that was following too closely. Waymo has that happen twice at the same intersection in Mountain View. There's a tree in the median strip there which blocks the view from their roof sensor until the vehicle starts to enter the intersection. So the Waymo system advances cautiously until it has good sensor coverage, then accelerates or stops as required.

Humans tend not to do that, and, as a result, some fraction of the time they get T-boned.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#263

Post by iainmerrick »

rsynnott wrote: post #227
iainmerrick wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transport often means buses, though, so self-driving AI is still very relevant there. If you could replace double-decker buses that arrive every 15–30 minutes with self-driving minibuses that arrive every 3–5 minutes, that would be great! (for everyone except the bus drivers who lose their jobs)

Typically in cities the biggest constraint on bus frequency is bus congestion at bus stops (and to a lesser extent congestion in bus lanes), not number of buses. To the point where banning cash on buses can meaningfully increase system throughput, as it decreases lag time at bus stops. This can be alleviated with planning where people have to transfer to get anywhere (moving buses out of chokepoints) but in practice…

I think a lot of those problems are solvable in principle, although unfortunately it’s probably not practical and incremental enough to actually happen...

I’m envisaging a system of minibuses, either AI-driven or at least dynamically directed by a central control system. People would use a phone app to book journeys; the app would tell them where to get on and where to transfer, and the central control system would optimise the fleet to get everyone where they need to go.

With much smaller buses, and electronic tap-in rather than cash payments, stops should be fast enough that buses can just queue up in order at each stop, hopefully mitigating the parking difficulties you mentioned (modulo breakdowns, medical emergencies, etc). Likewise, if transfers are fast and easy, hopefully they’d be less objectionable to travellers.

Requiring a phone isn’t ideal as it limits accessibility and privacy. There could also be pre-printed tickets, with QR codes that you scan at the bus stop to see the route info.

Why minibuses and not just taxis? I suspect there’s a good balance to be made between efficient road usage (buses) and efficient routing for each traveller (cars).

I’m also envisaging that if this system were to take off, personal cars could be gradually removed from city centres! Again, that makes life easier for the AI vehicles.

This is all pie-in-the-sky stuff, I know; but I do feel like there are ways we could radically improve city transport mostly using existing roads, rather than building new rails or tunnels.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#264

Post by vanilla_nut »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #214
lcnmrn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't see how smart roads would solve the issues of "the unexpected".. weird pedestrian behavior, getting cut off, parked trucks, construction, etc. It seems to me that smart roads would only solve the issue of general routing, and that already seems to be dealt with as far as I can tell.

It wouldn't. A real "smart road" implementation would require us to literally fence off those roads so pedestrians, deer, children, bicyclists, etc. cannot use them. And they would likely fail in any kind of inclement weather -- fog, snow, rain, etc.

Essentially an admission of failure for the self-driving car industry.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#265

Post by atonse »

lazyjones wrote: post #121
TheAlchemist wrote: post #4

Well, Musk said recently that the value of Tesla is 0 without FSD. Does anybody seriously think Karpathy would step down if FSD was really close to be released ?? It really starts to feel like Tesla is a huge fraud which is about to be uncovered.

> Does anybody seriously think Karpathy would step down if FSD was really close to be released ?? Life is not only about work. I stepped down from the company I funded after 14 years, it never stopped growing after that. Some people just get bored after doing one thing for a long time and want to explore other areas, especially if they always had broad interests. > It really starts to feel like Tesla is a huge fraud…

This is what I say when people call Musk a showman and a fraud.

I say that I must be imagining that I’ve actually been driving an EV for the past four years.

I must’ve dreamt having to drive only 2 hours out of a 12 hour road trip.

Bugs? Yea. Some really dangerous ones we all have read about. Manufacturing defects? Yup! Missed Deadlines? Hell yeah.

But a fraud? Nope.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#266

Post by actionablefiber »

pm90 wrote: post #174
actionablefiber wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I certainly hope so, and I've since moved to a place that is much more friendly for cycling; however if you go back to where I'm from (which for the purposes of this topic really could be one of any untold hundreds of counties in the U.S.), there are no signs of improvement or change. It's just the largest urban cores that seem to slowly be getting it. There is a breathtakingly large amount of suburban sprawl where the conversation about this topic is completely broken, and for the people willing to admit there even is a problem, they believe that the solution is one more lane, or one more stop sign, or just educating drivers a little bit better and nobody wants to talk about things like traffic calming, or upzoning, or cycle paths or anything else that makes anything other than car trips safe and desirable.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#267

Post by rootusrootus »

dirkg wrote: post #191
rootusrootus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they could lose their obsession with self-driving and just focus on their incredible cars, they'd still make money. They may want to think about that strategy soon. Model 3 is starting to seem dated (not to mention Model S, which is ten years old). There are very competitive alternatives on the market now that have strengths where Tesla is weak, and which are not especially weak in the areas Tesla is strong.

Model 3 is still the best electric car for most people. Its just too expensive now but so are others. No one else has a battery thats as efficient, the charging network, convenience features like key card, integrated navigation (although CarPlay/Android Auto are good too), the handling is much sportier, they hold their resale value, and no dealerships.

For a sedan, it's pretty compelling. But I expect my wife's next daily driver to be a crossover size, and more likely than not (at this point) a Mach-E. The range is there, the interior is good, CarPlay, and $15K less than a Model Y.

There are certainly some questions that are hard to answer. Maybe the Tesla will continue to hold value. But given that I see them everywhere now, they're feeling more like a commodity every day. I'm not sure how it will play out, the market is dynamic and recent events have been very disruptive. All EVs are selling out months ahead of production at this point.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#268

Post by aetherson »

ifaxmycodetok8s wrote: post #139
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.

> focus on their incredible cars They have terrible manufacturing quality. The screens melt in Arizona heat. Maybe the ride is cool and feels good, but the car itself is not incredible.

I think the whole "terrible manufacturing quality" thing is a talking point people seized on. They had problems with manufacturing quality as they brought up their whole factory/assembly process -- was their manufacturing quality ever "terrible"? Meh, I think it was kind of "we have kinks to work out." Nowadays, they seem fine.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#269

Post by kentf »

I shared a desk with Andrej when he was interning at our lab for the summer at the University of Toronto. One of the smartest people I ever connected with about all CS topics. Hopefully he finds what he is looking for and takes a well earned break.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#270

Post by sneak »

Twirrim wrote: post #83
function_seven wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remain convinced that "real" self driving (as in: go ahead and sleep in the backseat) will never happen without changes to road infrastructure and possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars. Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status to nearby robot cars (more than just a red lamp that can be occluded by weather, other vehicles, or mud on the camera le…

> Things like traffic signals that actively communicate their status to nearby robot cars (more than just a red lamp that can be occluded by weather, other vehicles, or mud on the camera lens). Or lane markings that are more than just reflective paint, but can be sensed via RF. Rules around temporary construction that dictate the manner of signage and cone placement that the robot cars can understand. The cones might…

ADS Mode B (used everywhere for airplanes) already works this way, and there is no authentication or signing whatsoever. It's a single global broadcast frequency (1090MHz).
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