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Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

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Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#41

Post by jameslevy »

Klathmon wrote: post #26
boldslogan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

neat. I would say im optomistic on this actual self driving stuff. But coming from almost no machine learning knowledge, doesn't this make tesla way ahead of google/waymo and others? Because they can simply check when they failed and tweak. I'm just curious if it does make them way ahead, and if so how much more ahead? Is this driving a car vs horse wagon levels?

I think the real answer is nobody knows. It's obviously got some benefits, and I think most people in ML would agree that real world data from the "average person" (as in "not a Dev or paid to do this") is worlds better than simulations. Still, "ahead" and "behind" isn't really a thing before you reach the finish line here. Many think Tesla will never reach full self driving or won't reach it without additional senso…

Is there any public research or data regarding the value or predicted delta value of long tail "average person" driving data of this kind versus the kind of data captured by driving around the same small portions of SF or MV? I've looked around but haven't found anything. Granted, Tesla and its competitors don't have an incentive to publish this kind of data...but are they even in a position to be able to calculate it currently?

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#42

Post by [deleted] »

new_realist wrote: post #30
danhak wrote: post #11

Looks like the cash situation is finally under control. They generated over $600 million in FCF in Q2. Compare this to only $200 million by Ford over the same period, also announced today: https://s22.q4cdn.com/857684434/files/doc_financials/2019/q2...

They sold a lot of existing inventory (as in, cars sitting on lots) this quarter. That generates cash. Loss is more than $400M on record sales. Tesla has a demand problem and is discounting cars in order to maintain the growth story.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#43

Post by boldslogan »

rndmize wrote: post #40
boldslogan wrote: post #12

anyone care to talk about this part "This feature is currently operating in “shadow mode” in the fleet, which compares our software algorithm to real-world driver behavior across tens of millions of instances around the world." that seems very juicy? edit: it seems people put a disclaimer on their ownership of tesla stock on hn about tesla threads. i dont own any.

Sounds like they're running their autopilot software on some (all?) of the cars in the wild, where they can compare what the autopilot would do with the actions taken by the human driving the car, and use this to analyze/refine their model/system. In casual talks with friends, this is something I've expected would be the competitive edge Tesla has over Waymo and the others; driving millions of "virtual miles" strikes…

Which makes me imagine a crazy marketing video where they demonstrate their system is driving the right path and the human crashes.

In huge black font, then they just show the statistics of how often that happens.

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#44

Post by almost_usual »

spullara wrote: post #35
almost_usual wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up 8%? It's down 10%+, what made you think it would go up? Rest of the market ripped up? The S&P is up 20% this year while Tesla has gone down 20%. Edit: >The opportunity cost of owning it has been huge while the rest of the market ripped up The S&P is up over 50% in five years. TSLA could go up 20% tomorrow (and ignore today's after hours change) and the S&P would still be outperforming TSLA.

He meant up 8% over the five year period.

>The opportunity cost of owning it has been huge while the rest of the market ripped up

Still doesn't make any sense. The S&P is up over 50% over five years. Outperforming TSLA by almost 3x (including the after-market change it is 5x).

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#45

Post by MegaButts »

ajross wrote: post #27
MegaButts wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I own no financial stake in Tesla, and while I love the goal of converting the world towards electric vehicles as whole I am not a fan of Tesla or Elon Musk. There are people much more informed than myself that believe Shadow Mode isn't real, and that Tesla is outright lying about its existence. https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1096322810694287361

That twitter thread (which is great, btw, everyone interested in this stuff should be following @greentheonly) doesn't remotely substantiate "Shadow Mode isn't real, and that Tesla is outright lying". I don't know the extent of public statements about it, but comparing collected data like the stuff detailed there to driver behavior is certainly feasible and almost certainly being done. It's also likely true that the…

I was stating his opinion, but I'll just quote him directly:

> We'll start with the bitter truth. The "shadow driver that just sits there in the computer comparing notes and sending discrepancies and interesting events to Tesla" is a myth. I used to think people just misunderstood Elon, but now I believe Tesla lies about it on purpose

I really did not mean for my comment to be inflammatory (hence the disclaimer and including a source), but considering how quickly it was downvoted I guess people do not approve.

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#46

Post by abledon »

ceejayoz wrote: post #32
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it means that the feature is running and the neural nets exercising, but not outputting actual control. The results are captured, but not acted on.

That's how I took it. They can then compare to what the human driver actually did, and find false positives (driver continued when the AI would've stopped) and false negatives (driver stopped when the AI would've continued).

ugh! the amount of supervised training data that would generate is staggering.

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#47

Post by slg »

new_realist wrote: post #30
danhak wrote: post #11

Looks like the cash situation is finally under control. They generated over $600 million in FCF in Q2. Compare this to only $200 million by Ford over the same period, also announced today: https://s22.q4cdn.com/857684434/files/doc_financials/2019/q2...

They sold a lot of existing inventory (as in, cars sitting on lots) this quarter. That generates cash. Loss is more than $400M on record sales. Tesla has a demand problem and is discounting cars in order to maintain the growth story.

This report is bad news for Tesla, but I think it disproves the "demand problem" narrative. Tesla delivered more cars than they could produce this quarter. Both delivery and production numbers were at record highs. The average sale price of the Model 3 remained stable. Meanwhile they are nearing production of the Model Y which is likely depressing demand of both the Model 3 and Model X. Once the Model Y is available, people expect it to have more ongoing demand than any of their current vehicles. Tesla has a lot of problems, but people not wanting their cars doesn't appear to be one of them.

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#48

Post by new_realist »

boldslogan wrote: post #12

anyone care to talk about this part "This feature is currently operating in “shadow mode” in the fleet, which compares our software algorithm to real-world driver behavior across tens of millions of instances around the world." that seems very juicy? edit: it seems people put a disclaimer on their ownership of tesla stock on hn about tesla threads. i dont own any.

Doubt the model will coverage as the actions are from human drivers, not generated by the model.

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#49

Post by [deleted] »

abledon wrote: post #46
ceejayoz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I took it. They can then compare to what the human driver actually did, and find false positives (driver continued when the AI would've stopped) and false negatives (driver stopped when the AI would've continued).

ugh! the amount of supervised training data that would generate is staggering.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla Q2 2019 Letter

#50

Post by bllguo »

leesec wrote: post #22
boldslogan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

neat. I would say im optomistic on this actual self driving stuff. But coming from almost no machine learning knowledge, doesn't this make tesla way ahead of google/waymo and others? Because they can simply check when they failed and tweak. I'm just curious if it does make them way ahead, and if so how much more ahead? Is this driving a car vs horse wagon levels?

Which company is in the lead is a very contentious topic it seems. This one specific feature doesn't seem to push it one way or the other. But IMO Tesla has the best approach and has a huge lead on the data collection pipeline. No other self driving company has even close to as many cars to test on / gather data from.

contentious? Genuinely curious for a source here. everything ive ever seen says Waymo is far in the lead, though I dont work in this space.
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