George Hotz Is Giving Away Self-Driving Software

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/qa-why-exhacker-george-hotz-is-giving-away-selfdriving-software

by devnonymous • 10 years ago

179 164 10 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

akerl_2• 10 years ago

This seems like the kind of end-run around the system that tech folks tend to think is a clever life hack, only to find out that legal/regulatory bodies aren't fooled. Like trying to convince the judge that you weren't speeding because if you set your frame of reference inside the car, it was the road that was speeding, backwards!

I only hope that the folks hand-rolling this onto their cars don't injure too many people in their attempt to "disrupt" cars.

trome3• 10 years ago

Yeah, I doubt that this code dump will stimulate a community to form in a legally safe way similar to the Linux kernel or GnuPGP, the choices of BSD and CC-ShareAlike-NonCommercial are likely to encourage manufacturers to pull a Sony and take the code, build their own training data and contribute nothing back.

pjmlp• 10 years ago

It is also a reason that as engineer (real degree, not self named), I support software being regulated just like everything else, not only on life critical situations.

Thankfully at least EULAs are void in most European countries and companies can be accounted for.

di4na• 10 years ago

Sadly, despite 50 years of work on it (and there are still lot ot work on it), we have no idea on what to regulate. Which is the culprit here.

tluyben22• 10 years ago

How would that work practically? I am sometimes for regulation but I cannot fathom what it would look like.

patcheudor• 10 years ago

This may very well be the future text-book example of how to not handle life critical systems and software, unfortunately it may well take people being killed. At this point we have no idea how this software handles pedestrians, cyclists, and even motorcyclists. We have no idea how it handles unanticipated situations like black ice or even construction zones. It has not been tested or certified by anyone. Clearly anybody who thinks they can download this, compile it and run it in their car likes playing with fire.

slavik812• 10 years ago

I support software being regulated just like everything else, not only on life critical situations.

That would be the death of free software. I'm also a P.Eng., but if we're going to require professional licensing, it should only be for safety-critical uses. Shared tools and knowledge have made software systems better and more affordable for countless people. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.

stale20024• 10 years ago

This isn't some "clever trick". It is genuinely not illegal to release a bunch of code open source on github.

The Government asked him to not sell his product, so he complied with the government's request.

chillydawg• 10 years ago

It is an ethically shitty move, though. The software is not properly tested. People will run it thinking it's legit and probably some will get hurt or die. The law doesn't matter.

toomuchtodo• 10 years ago

It insulates him from the government, not civil liability. If someone uses this and gets killed, he can still be sued and have to defend himself out of his own pockets.

tremon2• 10 years ago

He still seems to be operating a "data network", to collect driving data for further optimization. I think that part makes the "selling" moot, given that his business is based on input from this "free" app...

Oletros3• 10 years ago

The Government asked him to not sell his product,

Well, the Government didn't that, they asked proof that it was safe before selling it https://es.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special-...

cowsandmilk2• 10 years ago

To give an example of another field, the OpenAPS project for diabetes seems to be walking a very narrow tight rope in their actions and statements in order to not be regulated by the FDA.

https://openaps.org

cptskippy• 10 years ago

It didn't really strike me as an end-run but more like his interest was in solving the self driving car problem and when faced with solving the regulatory problem he said "no thanks" and walked away.

yalogin• 10 years ago

Serious question. He seems to lack tact, saying Ford never did anything remotely useful in computer science. Why would his investors let him piss off their potential acquirers that way?

drcross• 10 years ago

He basks in controversy. It greatly detracts from what he is hoping to achieve- automate humans traveling in large metal contraptions at 70mph. This is not an area for inflated egos.

jbigelow76• 10 years ago

"Move fast, break things"; eventual body count not withstanding, this is literally silicon valley's ethos for the last 15ish years expressed via temper tantrum.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

I hope he goes into space, I even have a name for his next company: astron'hotz.

CmdrSprinkles2• 10 years ago

While possibly too political to discuss on HN, Hotz is a Brand. His claim to fame was rooting an iPhone and later showing the world why we can't have nice things (showing that OtherOS was a security hole and making Sony disable it)

This was a continuation of that. He was hacking the future and all that crap to raise money. Once he and his backers realized there were actually regulatory boards for this (Oh no! Politics!) they had to pull out immediately. So they "fought the system" and open sourced it (not really) to show that he is A Man of The People.

And most people will never care to look at the source and will (hopefully) think he invented Teslas or whatever the hell.

And in a year or two, he and many of the same backers will innovate and revolutionize a new field have a new product that they can hopefully get bought out on before that field's regulatory board cares. And the buyer will know it is snake oil but will now have a reputation and a Brand to increase the value of the actual product they had been working on for years.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

Eh the "nice things" logic is so irrelevant here, I hope nobody expected this to be true with vehicles. Apple locked ecosystem has nothing to do with ... well gravity.

People either don't know or forgot that not long ago DARPA still held an open challenge to drive alone in the "desert".

dzhiurgis2• 10 years ago

Neither Marc Andreessen nor PG seem to be particularly tactful.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

Sorry for them, but in that department they're way below GH.

Nomentatus2• 10 years ago

The big car companies are acting like a forty-year-old who had a year's piano lessons when they were a kid but suddenly decides they really want to become a concert pianist, now, and earn big bucks from that. They shouldn't even want in the business. The false lure of getting in on high-tech IP and abusive lock-in has 'em dazzled. Releasing superior open code puts far more air up the automotive companies' skirts than stating the obvious reason why the auto cos' private code can't beat his open code into the ground. The sooner they realize they're chasing a dream, the better for his bottom line. A little shock treatment is in order, I think.

dovdovdov2• 10 years ago

I remember when we did lane image recognition in Matlab on uni, I felt like a master hacker. This was like 10 years ago.

Sure this is more advanced tech, but seriously, we should be far far further in the development of these.

I still have my tinfoil-hat hope that all these technologies are ready made and resting in a drawer, and companies are just milking the fossil fuel era as long as they can, and teasing us with this crappy progression meanwhile.

ohwello• 10 years ago

How would self-driving detract from fossil fuels? It should increase total demand for fuel.

cxseven2• 10 years ago

Self-driving tech would make vehicle sharing much easier, which would in turn allow people to use vehicles properly sized for their current need.

In other words, people wouldn't need a big honkin' SUV or truck most of the time, and could ride around in something smaller with just the fuel range they need for that trip.

Also, traffic might get better. If everything became automated it might even be possible to eliminate traffic lights.

stale20024• 10 years ago

The OP has it wrong. It wouldn't decrease fossil fuel use. But what it WOULD do is massively decrease the amount of cars that the world needs.

The average car spend 98% of the time unused, sitting in a garage or a parking lot. That is a lot of money that the car companies will lose when this technology hits mainstream.

tormeh• 10 years ago

There is no connection between electric engines and self-driving.

dovdovdov2• 10 years ago

Except it's easier to control an all-electric vehicle with constant torque, no transmission, etc.

AmVess• 10 years ago

He says it's better than anything other than the Tesla, yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project. I've been around long enough to know when something smells like bs, looks like bs, and sounds like bs...it's bs.

wyager2• 10 years ago

yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project

To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project. I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it.

Oletros3• 10 years ago

To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project

To be fair, looking at the code, it has all to do with the quality of the project

redthrowaway• 10 years ago

I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it.

Great, so don't make software for self-driving cars.

icebraining2• 10 years ago

So you're saying he may have been convinced he could make a self-driving car in the US and avoid dealing with the regulatory bodies?

Sounds like your opinion of him is even worse than the above.

captainmuon2• 10 years ago

I could imagine NHTSA was pressing him too early for his taste. I don't know Hotz personally, so I can just guess his motives, but if it was me I might react in the same way. After all, this is basically still a hobby project (although announced like a product and made by a very clever guy). Who knows if he even has the money and time to implement NHTSA's demands?

akerl_2• 10 years ago

It doesn't seem like a hobby project given he accepted VC funding for it.

Jarwain• 10 years ago

The NHTSA seemed to only request for comma.ai to push back a release date until further testing happened.

As for the money

Well, we have Andreesen Horowitz [the VC firm], which provided $3.1 million, and we spent under $1 million to do all of this.

tatoalo• 10 years ago

Yeah...an hobby project with 3.1M $ in funding. To be honest though I've looked into the github repo and from what I've seen I don't really think that's enough to get that amount of money.

mannykannot2• 10 years ago

The NHTSA should not be guided by Hotz' taste in this matter.

Do you see anything wrong with a hobby project steering cars around at high speed? Hotz is clearly a very clever guy, but his judgement is the issue here.

mikeash• 10 years ago

They had intended to start shipping units by the end of this year. If the NHTSA was pressing him too early, I can't imagine what would have been the appropriate time.

ttflee2• 10 years ago

By bs, do you mean poor practices like the one in throttle control system for Toyota Camry (which NHTSA/NASA failed to detect)?

http://www.embedded.com/electronics-news/4423365/Toyota-Camr... http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...

argonaut5• 10 years ago

If accurate this would be evidence that the NHTSA isn't very stringent, which would actually make Hotz's self driving project seem even worse.

ttflee2• 10 years ago

FYI: Previous discussion on the Toyota issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6636811

iiiggglll• 10 years ago

This whole thing is ridiculous. It only works because it piggybacks on the hard work of engineers at major manufacturers who put front-facing radar into their vehicles, plus a little bit of image recognition based lane keeping running on a smartphone. It's not "self-driving". It's time to put this sort of thing into perspective: it's Yet Another Half-Baked Level 2 Automation System (YAHBL2AS ?).[1] The world doesn't need another one of those. There's nothing new here. For reference, there's a comment elsewhere in this very HN thread from someone who said they did image recognition based lane keeping as a university project, and they said they did it 10 years ago using Matlab.

If there is going to be a new AI "winter" (and I'm starting to think that's more and more likely every day), it will probably be the result of too much hype around overblown ego-driven claims such as this. Hotz is probably doing more harm than good at this point.

[1] http://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf

ainiriand2• 10 years ago

I agree with you in some aspects but in the project description it is not mentioned the "self-driving" part, and I quote: 'Currently it performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Lane Keeping Assist System (LKAS)'. This I can believe is performed, at some degree.

Do you think the media can be overinflating the whole project?

mbrookes• 10 years ago

"it piggybacks on the hard work of engineers at major manufacturers"

What hard work? It's a COTS part.

Not to mention, front-facing radar, even combined with image recognition is woefully inadequate for true self-driving. (As opposed to, for example, Tesla's so called "Auto Pilot".

faragon3• 10 years ago

I agree with your point. By the way, I would like to point the "elephant in the room": what if after so many hype, heuristic/ad-hoc AI becomes able to beat expensive "deep learning" AI in most cases? In my opinion, that could bring next AI "winter". E.g. imagine a 5-10$ RISCV (or ARM/PIC32) 300MHz microcontroller with 4MB of embedded RAM/ROM beating 400-2000$ ASIC/FPGA stuff with teraflops and gigabytes of RAM in most AI problems with "good enough" results.

edit: grammar corrections

devnonymous2• 10 years ago

...and in addition, the attitude evident in the closed issues is more like -- "Here community clean this mess up for us, just don't ask us to give you anything functional, we have a company to run, you see -- at least this bit is free" ...meh, pass.

ceejay• 10 years ago

It appears, from the article, that they're working on a shoestring budget. My initial impression was that adding at least one full-time specialist, maybe more, simply to dot the i's, cross the t's for NHTSA, plus purchasing (or renting) infrastructure to do all the required tests could probably easily bankrupt the project in its current state.

My guess is sometimes it's probably ok to decide a project is not yet in a position (financially or structurally) to take on the additional responsibility of dealing with an enormous bureaucracy such as the US govt. And if that means you have to give your product away in order to do so, that's a calculated risk you might feel you have to take.

I seriously doubt that when NHTSA contacted them they were like, "just invite us into your building and show us around", like a health code inspector might.

xt00• 10 years ago

It would be interesting to have somebody who was knowledgable in the area of self driving cars to analyze his code. I mean it seems like he might benefit from a combination of learning a few things and some level of humility. I mean, Kalman filters, and even the algorithms used to lower the noise in images and radars were not invented overnight but when it comes to a car that may easily kill somebody it seems like it's worth it to be a bit cautious about learning about potential pitfalls to different algorithms and technologies. I mean build all the self driving car algorithms and cars that drive on test tracks, but if one of his cars ran over my kid, or anybody else's kid, then the price of progress is too high.

sschueller• 10 years ago

Am I missing something? I only see the dataset available but no source code.

jsjohnst6• 10 years ago

As typical for this type of article, it's poorly linked.

Here's the code: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot

andrewzk• 10 years ago

Wow, this codebase is alarmingly bad. No tests. Comments like "TODO: actually make this work" all over the place. I can see why geohot is terrified of regulators.

jsjohnst6• 10 years ago

Seems the most important part is not open-sourced:

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/4

arihant• 10 years ago

I might be missing something, but most of the critical code seems to be binary. It only supports two car models. So unless you own those two and are willing to let no-warranty indie code which you cannot see drive you around, this is a solid no-no.

mjpuser• 10 years ago

I noticed that too. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/v...

winteriscoming• 10 years ago

Looking at that github repo, its a handful of python scripts with around 30 odd commits? Am I missing something or is this really what is the core implementation of a complex thing such as a self driving car software?

Edit: Someone else in this thread commented that the repo linked in the article isn't the right one and apparently this is where the code resides https://github.com/commaai/openpilot

nitrogen• 10 years ago

Previous discussions came to the same conclusion, with the added realization that Python has no hope of maintaining the consistent latency required by a hard-real-time task such as driving a car.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

I don't know how much bandwidth and complexity is involved in processing the single cam setup, maybe with a recent core i7, the variability of python is swallowed by the cpu performance.

That said, Hotz claimed to have read state of the art papers, but it doesn't seem he meant hard real time physics/mechanics computations; probably neural net, computer vision and deep learning. Hacker way ?

jsjohnst6• 10 years ago

Python isn't the only code, there's also a bunch in C too, but that's mostly only provided in binary form.

tlb• 10 years ago

I was able to run walking robot control software in Python at 100 Hz hardly ever missing a tick. Because it uses reference counting for most garbage collection, Python performance is very consistent. Still, I wouldn't let it drive my car.

nikanj• 10 years ago

If not enough for that, at least enough to get $3.1 million in funding

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

comma.ai has other previous repos, maybe openpilot is just a release repo, which explains the low commit count.

Also they rely on python neuralnetwork libs which lowers the line count, probably tremendously, with the right abstraction already done you can go pretty far without a lot of lines (think yacc).

segmondy• 10 years ago

I just cloned it, it's about 40,000 lines of C code. More than a handful.

blauditore• 10 years ago

What surprises me about the repo is that there is no commit history before making it public. Did they manually copy the code (why should they?) or not use a VCS at all before (can't imagine this)?

phpnode• 10 years ago

It's common to sanitize a commit history before making code public. Old commits can contain potentially sensitive information, like certs committed by mistake and later removed, db dumps used for testing that contain unsanitized data, commit messages could be some value of unprofessional that you don't want to share with the world, that kind of thing.

tomtomtom7772• 10 years ago

Someone else in this thread commented that the repo linked in the article isn't the right one and apparently this is where the code resides https://github.com/commaai/openpilot

Hmm. Sorry, but no.

I am not going to let my car being driven by dynamically typed code without any tests.

Frankly, it looks like a hobby project that has grown a bit messy over time.

undersuit2• 10 years ago

I am not going to let my car being driven by dynamically typed code without any tests.

How are you going to enforce that? Make Tesla show you their source?

How are you not already enforcing that? Make the existing automobile makers show their source for the plethora of computer driven systems!

faragon3• 10 years ago

I guess that the hard real-time stuff is handled by a microcontroller board.

jakozaur2• 10 years ago

Wouldn't it better if he pivoted to self-parking?

At $700 a kit that allows car to drive by itself to garrage, open it, park would be so attractive.

Driving through parking lot seems to be way easier than fully autonomous car.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

You mean finding an empty spot and parking ? interesting small scope project.

jakozaur2• 10 years ago

Yes. Or even let me walk out of the car at front door and let it drive to garage spot.

Pros:

+ parking is one of the least favorite part of driving. It also eats a lot of time.

+ low-speed makes it much easier, you can stop at any time. Also stopping and asking human for help would be acceptable.

+ 360 sensors are superior to human vision in parking situation.

+ parking accidents are usually minor. Self-driving car getting minor bump, scratch is much easier to swallow them someone getting killed, injured.

+ you can implement valet parking for free. E.g. Self-driving valet that gets 30% discount would be so much welcomed in San Francisco.

mandeepj• 10 years ago

I don't think he was targeting full autonomy with initial release

paulsutter• 10 years ago

There are countless auto manufacturers around the world. I was surprised to see the length of the list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture...

I'm sure some percentage of these are willing to move faster than the major brands we know in the US. This strategy by Cruise could help then reach these smaller companies, some of whom surely have more flexible regulatory environments. Especially for local companies.

wichert• 10 years ago

FYI that list also contains manufacturers that went out of business a long time ago. The first one I looked at immediately said "The company [Minerva] became defunct in 1956". For some countries this is explicitly mentioned with a "defunct" headers, but not everywhere.

andrewclunn• 10 years ago

Torn. Concerned about safety, but wanting this to be open source and not vendor locked in...

sickbeard• 10 years ago

it only works on 2 cars.. that have a tech package. Might as well buy it from the vendor

Nomentatus2• 10 years ago

Vendors who will use his tech, now, 'cause it's free and better than what they could craft. His point is to offer his services to vendors. What's available now amounts to a demo.

occamrazor• 10 years ago

In which countries is it legal to install a DIY actuator system like this one?

eternalban• 10 years ago

A somewhat critical point of view from a month ago on George Hotz, comma.ai, and engineering ethics for this category of software:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Cor8E9...

tempw2• 10 years ago

He is not releasing visiond binary, the main part of the project though. Can't say with certainty buy I don't doubt it was a little of a publicity stunt

jamescostian• 10 years ago

not releasing visiond binary

Nit: he did release the binary[0] he just didn't release its source, and there's a README that mentions this:

Contact us if you'd like features added or support for your platform.

But I totally agree that it is pretty fishy to provide the source, especially in an "open-source" project...

[0] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/v...

[1] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/v...

tempw2• 10 years ago

yeah, the source, my bad. The blob is available

George Hotz Is Giving Away Self-Driving Software

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