Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla • Hacker News Board

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#41

Post by rsynnott » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#42

Post by strikelaserclaw » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #34

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.

If Musk actually said this he's an even bigger idiot than I gave him credit for. He makes the best cars in the world (obviously IMHO) and that's worth a lot more than 0. I couldn't give less of a damn if they can't drive themselves.

best cars in the world is a stretch

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#43

Post by espadrine » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

Jabbles wrote: post #12

impulser_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> doesn't seem any better at solving it I thought they had real self-driving taxis in Pheonix that you can order? Real ones, with no safety driver. That definitely sounds "better", even if it is heavily geo-fenced.

Waymo has superior performance based on their historical statistics. It makes sense, since their lidar sensors capture more of the environment, and directly in 3D. Their AI also seems better QA’ed.

The Tesla AI Day[0] surprised me as it showed they only had a simple architecture for a very long time, simply feeding barely processed camera pixels to a DNN and hoping for the best with little more than supervised learning off human feeds. Their big claim to glory was that they rearchitectured it to produce a 2D map of the environment… which I thought they had years ago, and is still a far cry from the 3D modeling that is needed.

After all, sure, we humans only take two video feeds as input… But we can appreciate from it the position, intent, and trajectory of a wealth of elements around us, with reasonable probability estimates for multiple possibilities, sometimes pertaining to things that are invisible, such as kids crossing from nowhere when near a school.

Cruise also seems to have better tech; they had a barely-watched 2h30 description of their systems[1] which shows they do create a richer environment, evaluate the routing of many objects, and train their systems on a very realistic simulation, not just supervised training, which means it can learn from very low-probability events. They have a whole segment on including the probability that unseen cars may travel from perpendicular roads; Tesla’s creeping hit-or-miss are well-documented on Youtube.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0z4FweCy4M

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJWN0K26NxQ

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#44

Post by akmarinov » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #18

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…

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…

Elon in 2024: “by 2026 we’ll have actual, real teleportation”

Elon in 2026: “by 2028 we’ll have FTL drives”

Elon in 2028: “time machine!”

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#45

Post by rsynnott » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

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…

> Any reason why everyone seems to be stuck on this problem?

Because it's really, really difficult. A lot of AI-ish stuff pretty rapidly gets to the point where it _looks_ quite impressive, but struggles to make the jump to actual feasibility. Like, there were convincing demos of voice recognition in the mid-90s. You could buy software to transcribe voice on your home computer, and people did. And, now, well, it's better than in the mid-90s certainly, but you wouldn't trust it to write a transcript, not of anything important. Maybe in 2040 we'll have voice recognition that can produce a perfect transcript, and human transcription will be a quaint old-fashioned concept. But I wouldn't like to bet on it, honestly.

And voice recognition is arguably a far, far easier problem.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#46

Post by TheDarkestSoul » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #41

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…

> 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.

I think a lot of that came from the Tesla hype machine creating a strong association between electric and self-driving as being the immediate future of cars in popular consciousness, so when people saw electric becoming a reality they assumed self-driving was right around the corner when in actuality their maturity levels aren't related much at all. Fallacious thinking that may doom a few companies between Lyft, Uber, and Tesla

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#47

Post by akmarinov » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #17

i wonder if tesla can afford to abandon autopilot. the strategy of always selling a futuristic vision of driving has always been core to the brand. if they happen to become just another boring electric car company, i'm not sure they can compete in the long run.

By autopilot do you mean Tesla Autopilot aka Traffic assisted cruise control or do you mean FSD?

Because there’s 0 chance they let go of the first, since that’s integral to any new car these days.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#48

Post by duped » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

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…

> Tesla has bet the company on robotaxis,

How so? They're not selling robotaxis or building factories to build them

> Tesla has repeatedly promised FSD is right around the corner

Which means it's years away and/or "FSD" means "automatic cruise control and lane keep assist" or whatever standard feature from auto manufacturers they've renamed

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#49

Post by bowmessage » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #17

i wonder if tesla can afford to abandon autopilot. the strategy of always selling a futuristic vision of driving has always been core to the brand. if they happen to become just another boring electric car company, i'm not sure they can compete in the long run.

They can pivot to selling an auto-autopilot; an AI-based process run totally within the car, which will autonomously work on the code for autopilot for the next 5 years. (/s).

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#50

Post by carbadtraingood » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #34

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.

If Musk actually said this he's an even bigger idiot than I gave him credit for. He makes the best cars in the world (obviously IMHO) and that's worth a lot more than 0. I couldn't give less of a damn if they can't drive themselves.

As an owner for 5+ years, the cars show well but pretty quickly become a pain in the ass.

They'll get eclipsed by other electric car manufacturers real quick.

Edit: more specifically, the parts break and they are difficult to replace. The battery degrades. They stopped providing maps to the vehicle unless I'm willing to spend several hundred dollars to replace the media console, they've told me I'm covered by a recall/warranty but have been unable to schedule the appointment.