Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-expert-andrej-karpathy-to-lead-autopilot-vision

by janober • 9 years ago

538 316 9 years ago

techcrunch.com

komaromy3• 9 years ago

Interesting, to move from an Elon-Musk-chaired non-profit to an Elon-Musk-owned for-profit.

komaromy3• 9 years ago

Also, this is very impressive for someone who finished his PhD less than two years ago.

glial• 9 years ago

He is one of a very few PhD students whose work I'd heard of and followed before they graduated. He had a great & informative blog, too.

Aron• 9 years ago

Yeah, it's always nice to see people overcome this particular handicap.

skadamat2• 9 years ago

I don't think he ever intended to stay at OpenAI long to be honest. He was a founding scientist of the nonprofit, so think he went there to do his time before he found an interesting opportunity (either in academia because he just finished his PhD or in industry)

unityByFreedom10• 9 years ago

Open AI was always a pipeline for Musk. Use other people's donations to attract and identify the talent, then move them under his payroll.

I guess that's a win win for the employees and for Musk. Not sure how many other supporters Open AI has, though I doubt that's what they had in mind when they donated to support that effort.

jfoster4• 9 years ago

Worth noting that OpenAI may not otherwise exist. It mightn't be precisely ideal, but I think it's broadly a 3-way win.

nsturis• 9 years ago

It's not like Musk doesn't donate to OpenAI himself..

sjg0072• 9 years ago

So where does this leave openAi?

komaromy3• 9 years ago

I imagine Pieter Abbeel and the rest of the gang will be able to carry on in his absence.

deepnotderp2• 9 years ago

This. Abbeel is a highly underrated research powerhouse.

tanilama• 9 years ago

Doesn't OpenAI gets large part of their funding from Elon?

letitgo12345• 9 years ago

I mean OpenAI is not a competitor to Tesla.

skadamat2• 9 years ago

OpenAI is pretty independent and has grown quite considerably. Karpathy was a founding research scientist but it seems like the nonprofit will march on just fine

randcraw• 9 years ago

A fair question. I suspect OpenAI's research agenda is actually less idyllic than most think since a) they never promised to "change the world", and b) their projects eventually must serve multiple masters with vested interests.

I don't really grok OpenAI's long term mission plan. "Keeping AI open" seems rather banal to survive long amid a cultural ethos as purposeful and dynamic as SV's. Perhaps the prospect of meandering their rather random path proved less pregnant with possibilities than AK had hoped.

Or maybe Tesla promises to build more than just KITT? Musk has huge ambition. I suspect Karpathy was enraptured at the prospect of sinking his teeth deep into a wide variety of tasty pies there.

ganfortran2• 9 years ago

OpenAI is a weird animal. Their research seems generally less impactful than rest of the top tier labs out there. But they do have great people on the team. Is it because their engineering infrastructure is subpar?

skynode• 9 years ago

Depends on how you see it though; the most impactful stuff is not necessarily the most reported in the media. As always, the media lags these things and so the public don't get to see shit coming.

Teodolfo• 9 years ago

I heard there were layoffs of engineers there. But obviously unrelated. OpenAI will continue unchanged.

timemachiner• 9 years ago

Since it seems to be a thing to report that X person specializing in machine learning has moved from Y company to Z, it makes me wonder if other areas of computer science is seen as relevant by the general public.

One rarely hears Dr. John Doe from Florida State University (or insert non-Standford university here) in Distributed systems has moved from Microsoft Research to NetApp. These are arbitrary names. The point is you rarely hear about people from other areas of CS outside of machine learning/universities outside of Stanford moving from one company to another. The field of CS is vast and there are multitude of practical and theoretical problems outside of machine learning that are worth looking into (ones that aren't currently considered hip or cool by the public).

dejawu• 9 years ago

I think it's fair and makes sense. A lot of Karpathy's work has been featured on HN and I find this news relevant in following what he's working on.

When Scott Aaronson wrote about moving to Austin, that post made the rounds here too.

sidlls• 9 years ago

This same thing is an issue in many scientific disciplines. How many people can even name an area of physics research that isn't particle physics or general relativity, for example?

sjg0072• 9 years ago

Biomedical

Cyph0n• 9 years ago

Well, physics is quite complex. I think electrical engineering is similar in that regard.

Personally, I am aware of the two you listed + experimental, condensed matter, and astrophysics. There is some overlap between physics and EE, so I may be aware of others.

Animats10• 9 years ago

There's lots of action in low-energy physics, down around absolute zero. There are jobs in semiconductor device physics.

doomlaser• 9 years ago

The person being replaced is Chris Lattner, inventor of LLVM and Swift, of whom it was big news of his leaving Apple to join Tesla fairly recently.

sjroot• 9 years ago

Interesting. What is Chris going to do now? He was a big hire.

shas3• 9 years ago

Dunno if this is his real account, but it is supposedly not working out https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704

rockinghigh2• 9 years ago

I doubt that Andrej is known to the general public. With every decade the fields of computer science sees its share of buzz words and trendy topics. It used to be programming languages or networking, and people in these fields used to make the news: Guido van Rossum joining Google or Leslie Lamport joining Microsoft Research.

jamesjyu• 9 years ago

You touched on a much wider human phenomenon: attention isn't evenly distributed. The media isn't pushed to report in proportion to an individual's impact. It's guided by trends, aka what people want to read.

AI is hot. So therefore there is a huge spotlight on all angles there. You can argue whether that is actually fair (personally, I do think AI is a high beta field). Topics that don't fall under this are regarded as inside baseball.

dmix3• 9 years ago

Media coverage and popularity always works this way. I'm not sure why so many people perpetually can't wrap their head around it. There have been endless comments online where people are offended or surprised that x person is getting attention, but they are just like these other people who are just as good.

But obviously there's more to drawing people's attention than the individual skill or a comparable position at a different company. As you mentioned this top of HN ranking is driven by joining a trendy company, leading a hugely hyped product team (the Tesla automation stuff was on the front page yesterday), and a personal with a really hot skillset.

Combined of course with the usual luck and good timing.

Is it really hard to see how this isn't much more interesting than someone joining a realitively standard branch of Microsoft?

Houshalter• 9 years ago

A lot of Karpathy's research and blog posts have been featured on HN. He made char-rnn which spawned hundreds of spin off projects that made it onto HN. He also comments here regularly and explains new research. So it makes sense that news about him would get attention here.

matchagaucho• 9 years ago

Tesla's market cap exceeds Ford and GM. Their ability to surpass Uber is contingent on hiring talent to develop self-driving cars.

ccorda• 9 years ago

Seems to be taking Chris Lattner's place:

https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704

jbuild• 9 years ago

Just saw that too. https://electrek.co/2017/06/20/tesla-autopilot-chris-lattner...

pscsbs5• 9 years ago

Wow! Tesla's official statement: "Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best." [0]

Chris's response: "Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all. I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!"

I don't think I've ever seen a tech company throw an employee under the bus so publicly. I wonder what Lattner did to warrant such a public separation?

[0] https://electrek.co/2017/06/20/tesla-autopilot-chris-lattner...

fooker4• 9 years ago

Bet Chris Lattner is heading to Google.

geodel3• 9 years ago

Don't people like it here when a company does not indulge in pc bullshit. I think Tesla statement is to the point.

MBCook• 9 years ago

Are we sure it wasn't the other way around? Maybe Chris really didn't like the engineering culture or something else and decided to leave, but given how big a story it was when he joined they needed to both put out a statement.

phren0logy• 9 years ago

I don't know, a bad fit may be just that. Could be more to it, but maybe not.

chc3• 9 years ago

I don't know if there's any better way to downplay a major hire leaving after less than half a year. Everything in those statements is extremely obvious from the circumstances and I can't think of a more cordial way to phrase it.

tricolon• 9 years ago

How did they throw him under the bus? I interpret both of their statements to be neutral and honest.

jacquesm5• 9 years ago

I wonder what Lattner did to warrant such a public separation?

Or what Tesla did. Why are you assuming it's Lattner's fault?

unityByFreedom10• 9 years ago

I wonder what Lattner did to warrant such a public separation?

Failed to make AP2 work well with cameras alone would be my guess. Tesla is hitting the glass ceiling with its sensor hardware and the future isn't going to be pretty. Expect more changes in engineering leadership until Musk realizes he needs better data (sensors) for his neural nets.

guelo• 9 years ago

It was always a weird fit having a compiler and programming language designer lead an AI team.

rockinghigh2• 9 years ago

Exactly. Chris is very smart but this is unlikely to be a good fit.

barrkel• 9 years ago

If the main source of problems was related to software architecture, it may have made sense. Academic AI people may be stronger on theory and end up with unmaintainable bridges. OTOH good architecture will be responsive to the fundamental underlying problems being solved, and that requires depth.

Compilers give a good base for transferring to things like databases, operating systems and IO heavy systems with lots of transforms / filters etc. They also ingrain a way of thinking that isn't native to most devs - writing code that generates code. Monads and other approaches to dynamically composing a computation - they come easy.

Robotbeat2• 9 years ago

That's the best explanation I've yet seen of why he left.

eludwig• 9 years ago

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but in the spirit of the high-profile failures (or misuse?) of the Tesla autopilot system, could it be that Chris had a fundamental disagreement with Tesla management over the direction and technical grounding of this feature?

All rank speculation, of course, but maybe he didn't like what was "under the hood" of this feature and how it was being developed and marketed?

Just spectator curiosity, but interesting to ponder none the less.

nojvek2• 9 years ago

I follow Karpathy on Twitter and really enjoy his blog. I do fear that his impact in Tesla could be less than his impact at openai. Openai had some fundamentally great research and ideas.

I wish him that best though. Hopefully some of Tesla algorithms will be open source someday and those of us who can't afford a Tesla will be able to use it as well.

awqrre2• 9 years ago

Tesla: "All Our Patent Are Belong To You"[0]

0:https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

aerovistae• 9 years ago

Not relevant. The software may not be patented but also just not published. You would have to reverse engineer it to get at the algorithms, and the car is surely heavily encrypted.

It's like Musk said with SpaceX: publishing patents is just like putting out a recipe book for China.

Animats10• 9 years ago

But not their "trade secrets". It's striking how little is publicly known about how each vendor's self-driving technology works. This is a technology that's grown up since the anti-patent "America Invents Act", and, as a result, there are few patents and much mystery. On rare occasions, someone gives a technical talk, but papers are seldom published.

xyzzy4• 9 years ago

If A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.

jfoster4• 9 years ago

Driving a car is currently specialised, as is folding laundry. The opportunity for autonomous vehicles is clear; you can start with replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income. (likely at somewhat less than 100% efficiency, but who cares because of the massive scale?)

The next bit would be converting private trips into automated rides; replacing car ownership. The unit profits will decrease as part of this effort, but the opportunity is again huge.

How will you monetise laundry folding automation? At best you can replace just some of the people at all the commercial laundries and turn that into profit, but many laundries may hire one person who does everything. For home use you could sell a machine, but how much would you need to charge for it for that to equal recurring revenue from autonomous vehicles and how much are people willing to pay for a laundry robot? (even robotic vacuums are still quite niche despite probably being more convenient and costing less than LaundryBot)

zghst4• 9 years ago

Laundry bot would make no money, I think. People are happy to do this task on their own or via a maid.

ams6110• 9 years ago

replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income

That's not how it works, because your competitors will undercut you. Then you will undercut them, and continue the race to the bottom until the natural price is reached.

babyrainbow6• 9 years ago

People are downvoting you. But I think this is a really good point...

chc3• 9 years ago

It isn't, though. The two tasks aren't very similar. It's a pithy put-down if you already don't like the idea of driving AI for other reasons, but nobody who's looking to objectively evaluate a technology for use in cars would say, "Hang on, let's first try to make it fold laundry."

tnecniv2• 9 years ago

No it isn't. Modeling how a robot interacts with cloth is actually quite difficult dynamically. Much more difficult than how a car operates.

zghst4• 9 years ago

The car is a legitimate next step with AI, computers and sensors are already integrated and have been doing basic functions like parking, whereas computers are not integrated into manual laundry task, this market has decided computers are not economical or profitable to integrate into the chain.

bpicolo2• 9 years ago

Laundry seems like more of a mechanics problem. I'm sure it's doable, maybe not particularly cheaply/compactly though

ewrcoffee• 9 years ago

but it could https://youtu.be/gy5g33S0Gzo

fest• 9 years ago

If I understand it right, it takes this robot ~ 90 minutes to fold 5 towels.

cityhall• 9 years ago

Anyone have any insight into what the top ML people are being paid right now?

pscsbs5• 9 years ago

The equity packages tend to be in the tens of millions for a 4-year vest.

Source: I am a manager who has given offers to top-tier ML experts.

soldierofhayley2• 9 years ago

No idea how you are getting downvotes, this is accurate.

senatorobama• 9 years ago

I feel so small.

bostonvaulter22• 9 years ago

Yes, but what is the salary. Tens of millions of stock could end up being worth $0.

zghst4• 9 years ago

If I fail at startup life, this is an obvious next step in my career.

foobarqux2• 9 years ago

With yearly refresh?

hueving• 9 years ago

Just to be clear, "tens" as in multiples of 10 million (i.e 20+ million)?

foresight• 9 years ago

If you are a hiring manager for top-tier ML experts, why would you be trying to inflate market value with outrageous claims?

deepnotderp2• 9 years ago

Fei Fei Li said Karpathy was offered more than a million out of school by an unnamed firm. One can only imagine what people like Alex Graves Ann's Nando get paid...

AndrewKemendo2• 9 years ago

500k+ for someone with a lot of experience.

300k+ for a new hire ML/CV/NLP PhD with some relevant experience.

150k+ for a new hire ML/CV/NLP MS with little to no experience

We were working with a very expert ML contractor that is doing 800k on his own from pop-up projects.

pscsbs5• 9 years ago

The top of the range you're quoting is for a typical Staff Software Engineer at Google/Facebook/Microsoft. "Top ML experts" garner much, much higher comp packages.

SammoJ• 9 years ago

Are these numbers for real, and are these all Bay Area? I'm further North and pull no where near these numbers as an ML PhD with a lot of experience now in the tech industry. Have I goofed on all negotiations?

du_bing• 9 years ago

Wonderful news!

terrble• 9 years ago

Karpathy. Car pathy.

* I hate myself for this.

mikeash• 9 years ago

You may enjoy (or hate) Wikipedia's article on aptronyms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym

manishmarahatta• 9 years ago

so it's done for other car industries :/

foobarqux2• 9 years ago

I think he'll regret accepting the position. Impossible deadlines are going to force him out in under 12 months.

kilroy123• 9 years ago

As much as I want to see Tesla and Elon Musk succeed, I wouldn't work for one of this companies. So I agree.

victor9000• 9 years ago

Likewise. As notorious as Amazon became for it's negative work/life balance, it seems like every Musk-run company is at least twice as bad. People regularly throw out 80hr/week numbers when discussing life at SpaceX. Thanks, but no thanks.

colmvp• 9 years ago

This is great to hear. Andrej has contributed a lot to DL students worldwide, what with his lectures online and his writeups, that I'm glad he's continuing his upward trajectory. A very inspiring person.

throw2bit• 9 years ago

What is so hackerynews about this ? Hackernews is turning facebooky with low quality content.

Animats10• 9 years ago

What this really reflects is that Tesla has painted itself into a corner. They've shipped vehicles with a weak sensor suite that's claimed to be sufficient to support self-driving, leaving the software for later. Tesla, unlike everybody else who's serious, doesn't have a LIDAR.

Now, it's "later", their software demos are about where Google was in 2010, and Tesla has a big problem. This is a really hard problem to do with cameras alone. Deep learning is useful, but it's not magic, and it's not strong AI. No wonder their head of automatic driving quit. Karpathy may bail in a few months, once he realizes he's joined a death march.

If anything, Tesla should have learned by now that you don't want to need to recognize objects to avoid them. The Mobileye system works that way, being very focused on identifying moving cars, pedestrians, and bicycles. It's led to at least four high speed crashes with stationary objects it didn't identify as obstacles. This is pathetic. We had avoidance of big stationary objects working in the DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005.

With a good LIDAR, you get a point cloud. This tells you where there's something. Maybe you can identify some of the "somethings", but if there's an unidentified object out there, you know it's there. The planner can plot a course that stays on the road surface and doesn't hit anything. Object recognition is mostly for identifying other road users and trying to predict their behavior.

Compare Chris Urmson's talk and videos at SXSW 2016 [1] with Tesla's demo videos from last month.[2] Notice how aware the Google/Waymo vehicle is of what other road users are doing, and how it has a comprehensive overview of the situation. See Urmson show how it handled encountering unusual situations such as someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom. Note Urmson's detailed analysis of how a Google car scraped the side of a bus at 2MPH while maneuvering around sandbags placed in the parking lane.

Now watch Tesla's sped-up video, slowed down to normal speed. (1/4 speed is about right for viewing.) Tesla wouldn't even detect small sandbags; they don't even see traffic cones. Note how few roadside objects they mark. If it's outside the lines, they just don't care. There's not enough info to take evasive action in an emergency. Or even avoid a pothole.

Prediction: 2020 will be the year the big players have self-driving. It will use LIDAR, cameras, and radars. Continental will have a good low-cost LIDAR using the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts at an affordable price point.

Tesla will try to ship a self-driving system before that while trying to avoid financial responsibility for crashes. People will die because of this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik [2] https://player.vimeo.com/video/192179727

ethanhunt_• 9 years ago

The difference between Tesla and Google is that Tesla actually has to ship these cars to customers right now. Wouldn't LIDAR double the cost of a Tesla right now?

gordon_freeman• 9 years ago

Cost should not be an excuse at the expense of safety. Plain and simple.

sbierwagen2• 9 years ago

Classic engineering ethics problem. Management says they have to ship "right now", but you know that if you do, 1 in a 1000 customers will die. If you wait a couple years, that'll go down to 1 in 1000000, but your company might go bankrupt.

Engineers at Takata and in GM's ignition key department made one choice, Waymo seems to be making the other.

Animats10• 9 years ago

Tesla didn't have to ship a car with unusable self-driving hardware. They'll probably have to eat the cost of a retrofit package on some vehicles to make that work. Like the Roadster transmission problem, where they had to replace all the early drivetrains with the two-speed transmission.

Nobody has built automotive LIDAR units in volume yet. That's why they're so expensive. It's not an inherently expensive technology once someone is ready to order a million units. It does take custom silicon. Tesla, at 25K units per quarter, may not be big enough to start that market.

Continental, which is a very large auto parts maker in Germany, has demo units of their flash LIDAR. They plan to ship in quantity in 2020. Custom ASICs have to be designed and fabbed to get the price down.[1]

[1] http://www.jobs.net/jobs/continental-corporation-careers/en-...

pkulak2• 9 years ago

Sorry, I kinda tuned out when you mentioned lidar like it's some requirement for autonomous driving.

Lidar is AMAZING for giving press demos on sunny days. For the real world with rain, snow, leaves, plastic bags, etc? Useless.

The future is radar + cameras + a LOT of software blood, sweat and tears.

ckastner• 9 years ago

The future is radar + cameras + a LOT of software

... all of which Waymo's solution also has, in addition to LIDAR.

freyir3• 9 years ago

That's like saying our eyes are useless because we can't see in the dark.

kamaal8• 9 years ago

I will take your self driving car seriously if you can drive it in all conditions in India.

Until then its just an attempt to make something that breaks at the next unanticipated exception.

LMYahooTFY• 9 years ago

Isn't Tesla parterned with Nvidia to solve the computation side of things?

I thought I remembered Nvidia presenting some additional stuff about it in their Tech demo recently.

PeterisP• 9 years ago

An autonomous driving feature that you can use on most days but not all of them is still very useful and would have a good market.

It's not going to rain or snow today, and if it would, then I can take the wheel myself.

_ph_• 9 years ago

As far as I know, no car manufacturer ships cars equipped with LIDAR. Nor do they seem to have a camera setup as extensive as Tesla. So I fail to see how Tesla has painted itself into a corner. The worst case is, that they are not reaching full autonomy with the current hardware setup. It certainly would be a big marketing blunder if they don't, but if necessary they can add LIDAR to the production, if they choose to.

freyir3• 9 years ago

They may have painted themselves into a corner by saying the current hardware is sufficient for "full self-driving capabilities." The worst case is they're putting half-baked solutions on the road.

mandeepj• 9 years ago

no car manufacturer ships cars equipped with LIDAR

For love of the god, please do not comment in the public if you do not understand the subject. Take a look at Chrysler + waymo minivans, Volvo + Uber suvs, Mercedes self-driving test cars. They all have lidars.

RealityVoid3• 9 years ago

As far as I know, no car manufacturer ships cars equipped with LIDAR.

I can confirm that, at least in a sense, this is false. There are plenty of series cars with LIDARS, but not he scaning things you are thinking about, but simpler kind of lidar tech[1]. I know that is not what you were talking about, but I thought it's worth pointing out other, existing, alternative approaches.

[1]http://www.conti-online.com/www/industrial_sensors_de_en/the...

pinouchon• 9 years ago

I think Nissan has bet that in a few years, LIDAR will be inexpensive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfRqNAhAe6c

Matthias2473• 9 years ago

Shipping hardware that isn't needed is not how automotive engineering works today.

Most automotive projects look like: You want to release a new car model in year X (with is typically around now() + 3-5 years). Then you start a development project exactly for that car, which involves creating roadmaps for the car, creating the architecture, sourcing the components, packaging everything together and testing everything. Most components (including infotainment systems, driver assistance systems, etc). are contracted to sub-suppliers, which develop them especially for that car model (or maybe a range of models from one OEM). At the end of the development cycle you have a car which has exactly one car which has (hopefully) everything that was planned for that model and which will get sold. In parallel the development cycle for the next model begins, where there might be only a minimal reuse from the last one. E.g. it might be decided that one critical driver assistance component is sourced from another supplier, is now working completely different, and requires also changes for the remaining components.

So if you do not intend to upgrade something or reuse it, it just doesn't make sense to include additional hardware for it. We will see the required hardware in cars which also will make use of their functionality.

For Tesla it will be quite interesting if they will really deliver huge autonomous functions on that hardware, or whether we will see a new generation Model S (with overhauled hardware) before anyway. I'm personally pretty sure that we will see new model generations before the software will be on a "fully autonomous" level.

Shivetya• 9 years ago

Chevrolet Bolt self driving test fleet comes this way. The difference is that Tesla has been talking loudly to get people to not see the short comings other companies are actively compensating for.

so what if they can add it to future production, their talk promises or implies they have all they need. yet cursory review of random youtube videos will show you how limited their system still is.

this may be another "war" they lead the charge on but falter in securing the win. you can play the car marketing game at times similar to the technology market but in the area of safety there is no compromise. instead of acting like a tech company pushing a new tablet they should have acted like SpaceX

bluthru• 9 years ago

Or even avoid a pothole.

Humans can avoid potholes with one eye. I don't know why you assume LiDAR is a requirement for this.

narak• 9 years ago

One eye backed by millions of years of training in depth perception and object recognition... The argument that humans are able to drive with just two cameras and software (brain) is deeply flawed because the brain is highly advanced in areas necessary for driving and Tesla's claim it will replicate that any time soon is absurd. This is why you need additional sensors like LIDAR to alleviate the computational load.

nnq• 9 years ago

Yeah, Tesla may fail to ship a safe LIDAR-less car.

But the problem of making a self-driving car without LIDAR or something equivalent is awesomely challenging! An I bet Andrej Karpathy will really enjoy working on it.

And the tech resulting from this line of work will surely find its way in other things. (I guess the military has wet dreams about this stuff... I mean, even "unsafeness" can become a "feature" here: "uhm, look, that school we blew up by, uhm, mistake... was an AI-error... like... these stuff happens, you know, even Tesla's cars have an accident from time to time, that's life". Well, those dreams could also be nightmares: basically any "self driving thingie" is a potential guided missile, and dirt-cheap-because-lidar-less stuff has the potential of becoming ubiquitous, and unmaintained/unupdated/unsecured/hackable, leading to nightmarish urban warfare scenarios...)

And: "People will die because of this."... Uhm, yeah, they will, but if people ain't dying it means research is not moving fast enough, and competition will overtake you. I'd be more worried about when this stuff will be deployed on buses with tens of people, but hopefully public transport would stay a safe decade behind bleeding-edge stuff :)

And about and Tesla: however this plays out, Elon Musk made quite a lot of what would've been technically considered "bad business decisions" and things turned up OK so far... so I wouldn't feel sorry for them or short their stock ;)

denzil_correa• 9 years ago

but if people ain't dying it means research is not moving fast enough

Could you help me understand this further? It feels quite insensitive to me.

taneq3• 9 years ago

I know it's popular to bash on Tesla's current challenges with their Autopilot software, but I think it's a bit unfair to expect them to be back in front of the pack just yet. They had their big breakup with MobilEye in, what, September last year? Nine months is pretty quick to go from total reliance on a vendor package to a reasonably functional fully in-house system.

sobani• 9 years ago

Can you explain the 'back' part of expect them to be back in front of the pack ?

As far as I know they've never been in the front of the pack.

CardenB• 9 years ago

Tesla had been working on a mobileye replacement for some time before they parted ways.

jacquesm5• 9 years ago

People will die because of this.

And not just drivers of Teslas.

Matthias2473• 9 years ago

Prediction: 2020 will be the year the big players have self-driving.

I think that depends on what you mean with self-driving. My prediction is that in 2020 we will have slightly better driver assistance systems. Maybe a lane assist system which won't kill me if I don't babysit it on a road with construction ongoing and multiple lane markings or if corners get too tight. Maybe some limited self-driving, e.g. only available in dedicated areas like highway/autobahn.

Keep in mind that 2020 is 3 years, which is less than the development cycle of a car. Or in other words: If something should get released in 2020 you now would already see it driving around on the roads for first tests.

My personal prediction is that we will see reliable and advanced self-driving technology in mass production cars maybe in 2 full car generations from now - which is 2030.

kamaal8• 9 years ago

>I think that depends on what you mean with self-driving.

It means a car that doesn't have a steering wheel, brake and accelerator. That kind of a car is quite far.

jacquesm5• 9 years ago

Maybe a lane assist system which won't kill me if I don't babysit it on a road with construction ongoing and multiple lane markings or if corners get too tight.

Or if someone else makes a mistake.

That's another scenario that can have very unpredictable and immediate consequences ranging from 'nothing' to 'two car accident with fatalities'. Even in relatively placid (when it comes to driving) NL I see this kind of situation at least once per year.

Then there are blow-outs and other instant changes of the situation. I do believe that especially in those cases it should not take long before computers are better than humans because of their superior reaction speed.

dheera• 9 years ago

I am curious about what percentage of accidents are caused by the driver falling asleep, and if a lot of lives could be saved by a driver assistance system that self-drives with even the crudest of sensors until the driver is successfully woken up, which would probably be several seconds later.

Animats10• 9 years ago

2020 is the year major manufacturers say they will have self-driving cars on the market.

- Volvo [1] - Chrysler [2] - Ford [3] (2021) - GM [4] (2018, first live test fleet) - Toyota [5] (although they just started with self-driving)

[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/volvo-predicts-fully-autn... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/25/google-s... [3] http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/16/technology/ford-self-driving... [4] http://fortune.com/2017/02/17/gm-lyft-chevy-bolt-fleet/ [5] https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-aims-to-make-self-drivin...

make3• 9 years ago

They really only hired a well known guy cool guy at a post with a lot of exposure. Your comment feels like pretty intense overanalysis to me.

Animats10• 9 years ago

Their previous guy quit. That indicates a problem.

sametmax3• 9 years ago

When musk said they were doing the first decent electrical sport car, everybody became an expert and said it won't work. Then he decided to do solar city and space x. And the crowd said again "naaaa".

Now the guy is tackling another hard problem and everybody knows better.

sixQuarks3• 9 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Elon Musk is not known for vaporware or BSing. If he says something is doable, there's a good reason for it. Musk has a combination of vision, an understanding of physics, and execution ability unmatched by any other person (in my opinion). To say that he has painted himself in a corner is highly misinformed.

evaneykelen• 9 years ago

Human drivers are also not equipped with a LIDAR. We rely on stereo-vision combined with a couple of low-tech instruments (rearview mirror, left and right side mirrors and looking-over-shoulder to achieve approx 250-300 degrees view of field) to navigate the road in a vehicle. If you extrapolate the current state of AI and treat 10-20 in-car cameras + radar as the equivalent of what a human brings to the table then I fail to see why Tesla has painted itself in a corner.

jgalt212• 9 years ago

true, but bird wings flap and airplane wings don't flap.

localhost• 9 years ago

Agreed. Raquel Urtasan's research is the cutting edge in this area: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~urtasun/. And she was recently hired/retained by Uber to lead their robot car efforts in Canada. Here's a recent video of her research from the National Academy of Sciences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW4M7-xcseI

tim333• 9 years ago

Tesla will try to ship a self-driving system before [...] People will die because of this.

On the other hand pushing the envelope on self driving technology using cheap sensors will probably help reduce the world's 1m annual auto deaths earlier than otherwise. Thousands of people will not die because of this.

slurple• 9 years ago

Have there been advances in using LIDAR in rain/fog/snow? For all the autonomous car demos this seems like too large of a use case to gloss over...

samstave3• 9 years ago

I find it funny that people can seemingly flippantly state that Tessa (or any of these cars) have "weak sensor systems" as if it is such a trivial problem.

"Well, there's your problem right there, let's just slap on some strong sensors and you should be good to go!"

You know what has a weak sensor system? Any car without any sensors.

mnarayan01• 9 years ago

Yea this seems like the key question. I don't know if Level 5 in two years is feasible, but if it's Level 5 or bust, then LIDAR won't fly (AIUI; would certainly welcome corrections).

On one hand, not pulling in potential safety improvements because they only work in good weather seems wrong, but on the other hand...that might be what needs to happen from a cost/marketing/legal perspective.

Animats10• 9 years ago

Yes, but they haven't made it down to the automotive level yet.

Most automotive LIDARs just report the time of the first return, but it's possible to do more processing. Airborne LIDAR surveys often record "first and last"; the first return is the canopy of trees or plants; the last is from ground level.

It's also possible to use range gating in fog, smoke, and dust conditions.[1][2] Returns from outside the range gate are ignored. You can move through depth ranges in slices until something interesting shows up. This seems to be in use for military purposes, but hasn't reached the civilian market yet.

Range gated LIDAR imagers have been around for at least 15 years. By now, it should be possible to obtain a full list of returns for each pixel for several frames in succession, crunch on that, and automatically filter out noise such as rain, snow, and dust. It's a lot of data per frame, but not more than GPUs already handle. Some recent work in China seems to be working to make range-gated imaging more automatic in bad conditions.[3]

[1] http://www.sensorsinc.com/applications/military/laser-range-... [2] http://www.obzerv.com/en/videos [3] http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?ar...

lianqiao9• 9 years ago

Full autonomous is conflict with Tesla's business model: selling cars. I think Tesla's real goal is to build the easiest driving massive production car. Massive production means the car always need a person to baby sit. For full autonomous, they don't need massive production (>10M units) to build the service network.

Diederich2• 9 years ago

Tesla will try to ship a self-driving system before that while trying to avoid financial responsibility for crashes. People will die because of this.

This is a pretty strong statement. Would you sign up for a slightly more specific version of your claim?

"I believe the Tesla self-driving system that ships by the end of 2020 will be statistically less safe than unassisted human drivers."

nodesocket• 9 years ago

Andrej paired with chip guru Jim Keller [1] (vice president of autopilot hardware engineering) should be an amazing combo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)

wideem• 9 years ago

Haven't thought that Andrej is such a big star in tech and deep learning communities. Which him all the best, his deep learning course was amazing

smithsmith• 9 years ago

How old is Andrej Karpathy ? Unable to find on google.

visarga• 9 years ago

Probably around 30.

tnecniv2• 9 years ago

From his website, he entered his BSc in 2005, suggesting he'd be about 30.

Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy

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