[HN Gopher] Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla
___________________________________________________________________
Andrej Karpathy leaves Tesla
Author : danols
Score : 102 points
Date : 2022-07-13 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| pen2l wrote:
| This comes after yesterday's news of Tesla letting 229 people go
| who were working on Autopilot:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/12/tesla-laying-off-229-autop....
| mkl wrote:
| 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 about that progress to me.
| xeromal wrote:
| 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.
| cheeselip420 wrote:
| lol - FSD is a scam, and the reckoning is here.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| 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 take some time off to "sharpen my technical
| edge," which makes it sound like this is the result of
| frustration with the technical approach instead of burnout.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| TheDarkestSoul wrote:
| 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
| duped wrote:
| > 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
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _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.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| I don't think tesla is but a lot of 'investors' are
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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 worrying to see Karpathy leaving...
| akmarinov wrote:
| 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!"
| gruturo wrote:
| > Elon in 2028: "time machine!"
|
| Well, to be fair, he only has to hit _that_ goal - at which
| point he can go back in time at his leisure and fix all the
| others. And he could hit even the time machine goal as late
| as he wants, and it won't matter.
| glintik wrote:
| > if he felt they were close to solving the problem anytime
| soon He felt? It's evident enough, that approach they used
| doesn't allow them to prepare FSD for real life and real
| streets. I think he just understood, that approach to be
| changed/improved significantly to reach the goal.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Uber bet the company on robotaxis and lost. Tesla is still
| building very good cars that happen to not be able to drive
| themselves. Just like every other car. If they could lose their
| obsession with self-driving and just focus on their incredible
| cars, they'd still make money.
| impulser_ wrote:
| 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 as well.
|
| They are just going about it better but not trying to selling
| it.
|
| Any reason why everyone seems to be stuck on this problem?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Any reason why everyone seems to be stuck on this problem?
|
| ML maximalism focused on the narrow problem of 'solving
| driving' while not recognizing that any task as complex as
| driving requires probably something closer to general
| intelligence, and theoretically the field has been
| impoverished in favor of "throw more graphics cards at
| everything".
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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. Need to understand the cop with the thick NY accent
| yelling at you saying "Can't you see there's been an
| accident and the road is covered with glass you dufus? Turn
| the F around."
|
| I can certainly see AI solving the problem of driving in
| specially designed limited access highways (which could
| also support normal human drivers), and that alone would be
| a huge benefit, but I never saw how so many were willing to
| make the leap to "robotaxis that can drive you anywhere in
| the city."
| dmd wrote:
| 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
| naijaboiler wrote:
| 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
| highwaylights wrote:
| Even then, even if you can solve every case involving
| actual roads with perfect markings and intact signs and
| functioning signals, I've found myself just this week:
|
| - driving across an unmarked grassy mound to park a car at
| a store in their designated area.
|
| - paying a fee with coins to enter and exit a toll road.
|
| - stopping to move around roadworks based solely on hand
| signals from one of the workers.
|
| These aren't even scratching the surface in terms of edge
| cases that could be encountered regularly.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| Jabbles wrote:
| > 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.
| espadrine wrote:
| 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
| impulser_ wrote:
| Yeah, but I am sure Tesla's software can do the same.
|
| Depending on the route, you could probably even do it with
| comma.ai hardware.
|
| When I think of FSD, I think any route under any condition.
| jowday wrote:
| They've also got real ones with no safety driver in San
| Francisco right now.
| alphabetting wrote:
| There's been a lot of progress despite AVs not meeting
| intitial hyped predictions. Waymo and Cruise are operating
| driverless robotaxis in SF. We're probably a couple years
| from many major cities having them.
| tootie wrote:
| Probably because it's really, really, really hard to solve
| the thousands of edge cases that occur in real-world driving
| situations. I don't think FSD happens until government gets
| behind it and starts putting infrastructure behind it. If we
| start building roads (and cars) to be highly visible to AI
| one way or another, it all becomes much easier.
| cco wrote:
| I paid ~$10 for two rides after signing up as a regular ole
| user in Mesa AZ. It was great, the first ride was a bit nerve
| wracking, but the second felt very nice.
|
| I certainly wouldn't argue with you that it isn't ready for
| prime time and wide distribution, but it is interesting to
| see their progress in San Francisco, a much different driving
| problem.
|
| If it takes them 10 years to get to prod in Mesa, two (maybe
| three?) in SF, maybe they start shrinking that a lot in
| metros without winters. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 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
| means we have to approach it with systematic engineering, and
| the solution will probably involve some combination of better
| sensors, introspectable neural nets, symbolic A.I., and
| logical A.I.
| function_seven wrote:
| 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 lens). Or lane markings that are more than just
| reflective paint, but can be sensed via RF. Rules around
| temporary construction that dictate the manner of signage
| and cone placement that the robot cars can understand. The
| cones might have little transponders in them, I don't know.
|
| But without a massive leap forward in AI capability, our
| current road system--optimized for human drivers over the
| past century--is not going to work.
|
| If we can't make the cars just as smart as an alert and
| capable driver, then maybe we need to meet halfway and make
| the roads a littler "dumber" (simpler) to accommodate the
| robots.
| highwaylights wrote:
| What if we just, you know, walk a bit more instead?
|
| Or even cycle? I hear great things.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| And we haven't even adressed that drving is not a purely
| technical endeavor, it's largely a social one.
| sonofhans wrote:
| 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.
| raydiatian wrote:
| Sort of. Your wording actually assumes down to its core
| that driving is inherently social. Driving _currently_ "is
| social" in a few senses, But mainly the obvious one that it
| involves people observing each other's actions.
|
| 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 full scope of human
| expressivity that you've put behind the wheel of a vehicle.
|
| The REAL problem is how do we take our roads to the
| crossover point where those network features become
| accessible.
| bsaul wrote:
| 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.
| akmarinov wrote:
| 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.
| bowmessage wrote:
| 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).
| xeromal wrote:
| They're laying off people how label data. This isn't the devs
| that actually work on the software.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| 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.
| akmittal wrote:
| Irrespective of what he said, it won't be 0, Tesla would still
| be one of the best electric cars available.
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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).
| atombender wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I'm now seeing a lot of VW ID.4s and Skoda Enyaqs
| (basically the same car, different styling) in Sweden.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If I have to pick a side in the battle of who can produce
| the most cheap batteries, an insane Twitter addict or
| state-controlled industries of South Korea, I'm going with
| the Koreans.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| That's probably true !
|
| But in itself, just making on of the best electric cars today
| would justify a valuation of 1/10 of what Tesla currently
| have.
|
| I still admire Musk and Tesla for having started the electric
| revolution. But by 2025 (and maybe already are), they will
| just be one of many electric car manufacturers - somewhere in
| the middle of the pack.
| svnt wrote:
| He did not start it. He did a hostile takeover and revised
| the history of Tesla so he could be a cofounder.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| FSD may be a huge fraud but the whole company is not. The cars
| are real!
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| The cars are real but they are... Mediocre. The first year of
| ownership is an amazing honeymoon period, assuming you got
| one with decent build quality. But the parts are cheap, and
| they break quickly. I've had one for 5+ years and it's
| gradually become something I prefer driving less and less.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Sure !
|
| But are the financials of the company also real ? The
| prospects of future products ? Robotaxis, FSD, Cybertruck,
| Semi ?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _Well, Musk said recently that the value of Tesla is 0
| without FSD._
|
| In fairness, this is just another in the long line of
| ridiculous things that he is prone to saying.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 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.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| best cars in the world is a stretch
| pwagland wrote:
| It is a stretch, but they are clearly also not the worst.
| The company clearly has value without FSD. Not the value
| that the market currently gives it, but value nonetheless.
| carbadtraingood wrote:
| 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.
| akmarinov wrote:
| I'll give you best in efficiency, quick electric cars
|
| As for luxury, quality, ride comfort - they're just ok
| bhauer wrote:
| It was exaggeration as a figure of speech to suggest that if
| self-driving is solved, it will make the EV business look
| incredibly small.
|
| What's shocking is how many people interpreted it literally--
| that the value is literally zero without self-driving--as if
| the successful EV business is in fact unsuccessful.
| wnevets wrote:
| Don't worry guys, FSD is right around the corner!
| rvz wrote:
| Oh dear. So who is going to improve on making and shilling the
| 'Fools Self Driving' (FSD) beta demoware that not only it is
| 'allegedly' half-working, but is already under ridiculous amounts
| of scrutiny and investigation by the regulators, especially with
| deceptive advertising putting drivers on the road at risk?
|
| Once again, where are the robot-taxis as promised for release in
| 2020?
| viburnum wrote:
| It never made any sense but there was too much money to be made
| in pretending.
| Barrera wrote:
| 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.
| qaq wrote:
| And yet Tesla is dominant player in luxury segments they have
| products in
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Can anybody give insights in to how key this guy is to Tesla. Is
| it a big deal? What's his USP?
| Tyndale wrote:
| Cars will never drive themselves.
| rafaelero wrote:
| It's fun to see everybody succumbing to scaling laws. We will
| only have FSD when we can run realtime inference with a huge
| model. No amount of creativity seems to overcome the fact that
| bigger is better. So, let's wait Moore's law do its job.
| melling wrote:
| That was the prediction when he took a "sabbatical" back in
| March.
|
| Why do people leave companies in this manner?
| spicymaki wrote:
| A couple of theories:
|
| 1) It sometimes can be hard to leave a company when you are "in
| the thick of it." A sabbatical can give you personal time to
| reflect on whether you want to stay or not.
|
| 2) Sometimes people use sabbaticals to prep/perform job
| interviews or plan career transitions.
|
| 3) Sabbaticals can allow you to quit early while waiting for
| vesting restricted stock units, employee stock plan sales,
| retirement contributions (matches), etc. There are certainly
| many more timed bonuses available for senior leaders.
| [deleted]
| WatchDog wrote:
| Employee: I quit.
|
| Employer: Are you sure? Why don't you take some time off and
| think about it?
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Totally this. If you've got somebody who is critical to the
| success of the business you do anything you can to keep them
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| Oh well, at least Musk has Twitter to fall back on.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Actually it seems like he believes there are too many bots to
| care about freeze peach
| akmarinov wrote:
| It's ok, before he agreed to buy it, he said he'll get rid of
| all the bots once he buys it
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