361–370 of 441 posts
My point is, people leave their jobs for many reasons other than how well the company is doing. At least I hope so.
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I fully believe Elon and Jim Keller truly thought the deep learning HW delivered by Tesla was capable of self-driving in the early 201x time frame because, frankly, a lot of us did. More than likely, like the rest of us, they slowly came to see that the problem was much more difficult, and deep learning much less capable, than we had originally envisioned. Most of us didn't make a bunch of stupid promises to sharehol…
As someone who has worked for almost a decade with safety critical software, system design and functional safety analyses (both aerospace and automotive) etc. I don't think I ever met anyone who believed they would be anywhere near FSD/Level-5 what-have-you in the timeframe they presented. The only ones I met who thought so was managers and software developers and ML-people, i.e. people who has never in their life se…
And you were right, but most people aren't like you, and people like you don't drive the discussion on what trends are coming. The world needs more folks with your background. Generally no one wants to listen to folks like you because you come off as a Debbie Downer despite being correct most of the time.
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…
There is usually a hierarchy of sensors, mainly for redundancy. Example: Bumper sensory at the wheel base, sonar / Lidar at the mid, and a camera at the top for advanced sensing.
For the sake of cost cutting Tesla has done away with their radar sensors at the front of the vehicle. It would be a substantial cost overhead, but have very real repercussions when it comes to safety, while also providing a "ground truth" to what at least the front facing cameras are seeing.
I don't think Lidar is a practical sensor for them to adopt, because it is quite bulky and has limited viewing angles, but I would expect them to have adopted some novel, lower cost radar solution.
Apart from the lower cost of the camera, I think Elon's rationale for having a camera only FSD is not valid, has made the problem needlessly complex and unsafe. He believes since we have eyes, and we can drive a car, then it should be sufficient to drive the car, but we only use eyes because these are the sensors we were born with, it is the best we have. In my mind, Elon's approach is like looking at a horse, and saying to yourself, that you want to build a car based on a horse, where instead of wheels, you have four mechanical legs, and those mechanical legs are limited is so many ways, but they should still at least "work", but there is no reason to limit locomotion in that way. The same with the vision system on a FSD, the whole spectrum of light is available, with any number of configurations, providing data at rates and with precision far beyond what a camera system can do.
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Because self-driving has a bunch of tricky edge cases and most of them will kill people. Problems with hundreds of important edge cases cannot be solved by simply throwing more training data at the problem; that's how you solve AI problems in a "dumb" manner, and it works for lots of problems (like recognizing dogs in images) -- but not for self-driving. To solve the self-driving problem we need "smart" A.I., which m…
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…
what's missing is combining this kind of "human concept relations" model (language, rules, minimal reasoning, text encoded human preferences) with perception, and safety (which means that the model should know that if other cars are driving just fine in front then it's unlikely that the road is on fire, or that the low certainty crack in the road is okay if two other cars already went over it unimpeded, if the road marks and the signs are inconsistent, but other vehicles have formed a slow but consistent pattern of traffic then that's the local ruleset, and so on)
it's still a very hard problem. and the required amount of compute is still bonkers, the required amount of data and training is still absolutely huge, and the whole problem of safely disengaging, handling the asleep/drunk passengers (likely target audience after all)... are all hard problems too :)
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Yes. You bring up a great point: With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway and organize into closely-spaced convoys. Only the lead vehicle would need an active human driver; the rest could follow at extremely close distances--drafting off each other--and would not need a human driver (or their human drivers could go off-duty). The point of u…
> With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway I think the idea is to get rid of the roads and have the robo vehicles travel instead on tracks. That increases fuel efficiency and bypasses a lot of AI challenges.
It’s the low-key case that Elon will be remembered poorly (like Robert Moses’ rapidly degrading legacy) for
1) Having the wrong vision for EVs (but successfully executing non it anyway)
2) Making space travel cheap (thereby increasing the amount of carbon energy dedicated to it) without really improving an average human’s quality of life
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…
> but their vision only tech stack doesn’t seem capable of solving it Well, I'm not sure that anyone's tech stack is capable of solving it; the live examples of robotaxis are, well, not something you'd bet your company on (and generally their creators are _not_ betting their companies on them). There was, I think, a decade ago the idea that fully self-driving cars were a near-term inevitability. That's fading, now.
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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.
You have a point. But did Theranos customers were thinking they were a fraud ? Nope - they were getting their blood test results done, although not in a way Theranos advertised. Of course the Tesla cars are not a fraud - they are actually pretty good - and for a long time they were the only EV out there. But it's no longer a case, and they are just becoming one of the 50 EV car makers out there. And Elon seems to kno…
The Model Y was recently the best-selling car regardless of technology (i.e. overall best-selling passenger car) in several countries. Most notably, last month in China.
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Isn't Tesla supposed to be producing Optimus, their human-like android, next year? Elon has been over-promising(i.e. flat out lying) about self-driving every year since.. 2014(there's a youtube video compilation of it)? It seems like his strategy is to just come up with increasingly grandiose promises every year when he fails to deliver on his past promises. He's trapped in his swirling vortex of bullshit. Very worry…
he's been doing it on starlink too, but he gets a pass on HN for that one.
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> Elon in 2028: “time machine!” Well, to be fair, he only has to hit _that_ goal - at which point he can go back in time at his leisure and fix all the others. And he could hit even the time machine goal as late as he wants, and it won't matter.
Since this is HN and we're playing the tbf game... To be fair he'd only have to hit the FTL goal and then FTL can be used as a time machine.
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And Jobs' "reality distortion field" was primarily used to motivate / burn-out his team by demanding things that were technically very difficult but feasible (one of the original anecdotes was about reducing the boot-time for the original Macintosh), not something like solving AGI which FSD would ~apparently require.
I fully believe Elon and Jim Keller truly thought the deep learning HW delivered by Tesla was capable of self-driving in the early 201x time frame because, frankly, a lot of us did. More than likely, like the rest of us, they slowly came to see that the problem was much more difficult, and deep learning much less capable, than we had originally envisioned. Most of us didn't make a bunch of stupid promises to sharehol…
The guy was critized for being old school and not having adapted to the latest tech (including by elon musk when he dumped mobileeye), but in fact he was just plain right.
i think the tech community owes him an apology.