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Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

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Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#61

Post by cheeselip420 »

xeromal wrote: post #52
mkl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much a totally different category of employee, though: "Tesla is laying off 229 data annotation employees who are part of the company’s larger Autopilot team [...] Most of the workers were in moderately low-skilled, low-wage jobs, such as Autopilot data labeling" Data annotation can be cheaply outsourced or scaled up and down without much affecting progress on self-driving. Karpathy leaving says more ab…

On top of that, this might signal that Tesla is confident enough in their autolabeling that they no longer need as much human intervention. This job title theoretically should be temporary.

lol - FSD is a scam, and the reckoning is here.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#62

Post by naijaboiler »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #26
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…

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…

And we haven't even adressed that drving is not a purely technical endeavor, it's largely a social one.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#63

Post by clouddrover »

duped wrote: post #48
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

> 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 nine years straight:

https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...

The lies have been profitable so far. People have bought into the false promises. Perhaps they'll start demanding refunds for the full self-driving they paid for that has still not been delivered.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#64

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

duped wrote: post #48
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

I don't think tesla is but a lot of 'investors' are

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#65

Post by Barrera »

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 gone a different way and played the game from the true upstart: targeting the low end of the car market. Attack from below. But it didn't do that.

Incumbents always win at the sustaining innovation game. The electric power train is a sustaining innovation for the automobile industry. It doesn't break any incumbent's business model (financing the purchase of expensive cars), especially at this point. And we're now seeing this with all of the EV introductions and announcements from incumbents. Oddly, though, there are plenty of upstarts trying to do exactly what Tesla tried - attacking the blubber-rich end of the market with an immature technology.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#66

Post by highwaylights »

function_seven wrote: post #57
dreamcompiler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 if we just, you know, walk a bit more instead?

Or even cycle? I hear great things.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#67

Post by atombender »

01100011 wrote: post #19
akmittal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrespective of what he said, it won't be 0, Tesla would still be one of the best electric cars available.

For how long though? It seems like traditional automakers have mostly figured out EVs now. I love my Chevy EV, and it's 4 years old now. Similarly, the Kia EV I recently drove was excellent(although the Bolt one pedal driving is better IMHO).

The situation outside the US is even worse for Tesla. There's a whole swathe of great EVs these days from VW (ID.3, ID.4), Renault (Megane, E-2008), Opel (Corsa-e), Volvo (C40, XC40), Ford (Mustang Mach-E), Jaguar (I-PACE), Polestar, BMW (i4, iX), Audi (e-Tron), Mercedes (EQS), Skoda (Enyaq), etc.

The range of models is also much wider in terms of affordability. In Europe, we've reached the point where an EV is just another car, and even the cheaper ones have tons of clever bells and whistles like 360 cameras.

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#68

Post by naijaboiler »

dmd wrote: post #36
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. Especially when it comes to city driving, which would obviously be necessary for robotaxis, when AI zealots promise "it'll be here in a year or two", I always wondered "Have these people ever driven in the city?" I mean, to drive in a city, you basically: 1. Need to understand all standard signage (seems possible with AI). 2. Need to understand all "unstandard" signage (not sure how possible). 3.…

4. Need to understand the cop who is directing people into lanes by jutting his chin subtly in different directions when you make eye contact with him 5. Need to understand that occluded objects have not vanished from the universe never to be seen again

6. Need to reasonably predict what that human that just made eye contact with you would likely do next, and how that's different from what he might do when he doesn’t make eye contact with you. And all of that differs if you're in NYC or SF or small town, Indiana

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#69

Post by simonswords82 »

WatchDog wrote: post #29
melling wrote: post #2

That was the prediction when he took a “sabbatical” back in March. Why do people leave companies in this manner?

Employee: I quit. Employer: Are you sure? Why don’t you take some time off and think about it?

Totally this. If you’ve got somebody who is critical to the success of the business you do anything you can to keep them

Re: Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla

#70

Post by raydiatian »

sonofhans wrote: post #37
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…

Driving is a social problem, not a technical one. It's functionally the same as walking down a crowded sidewalk. The car is just a tool, just an extension of our bodies. We can't build a robot which can walk down a sidewalk without running into people either. The sensor tech and mapping fidelity are red herrings. People drive well because only people are good at predicting human behavior.

Sort of. Your wording actually assumes down to its core that driving is inherently social, when in fact I think it may be only provisionally social. Driving currently “is social” in a few senses, But of course the important (and obvious) one is that it currently involves accounting for human-operated vehicles.

Alternatively, an autonomous vehicle operator in a homogenous network full of other autonomous operators has capabilities and characteristics that greatly simplify failure modes. Maybe even majority autonomous, partially heterogeneous? You can literally slow or stop the whole show to deal with a catastrophic event. It’s still “social” but probably much reduced from the scenario where you’ve got the full scope of human expressivity behind the wheel.

The REAL problem is how do we take our roads to the crossover point where those simplified network features become accessible.

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