[HN Gopher] A 100x Investment (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
A 100x Investment (2019)
Author : allenleein
Score : 92 points
Date : 2022-07-19 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.comma.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.comma.ai)
| rootcage wrote:
| You mention that tesla and comma have similar technical
| infrastructure. Tesla is doing or has done many of the caveats
| you describe about other companies, can you dig deeper into Tesla
| as a competitor?
| kjksf wrote:
| The big architectural (and business strategy) difference
| between Tesla and more or less everyone else (Waymo, Cruise,
| Apple...) is:
|
| - doesn't rely on lidar
|
| - doesn't rely on pre-mapping areas
|
| - ships intermediary products vs. big bang approach of "100%
| self-driving or nothing"
|
| - makes money on those intermediary products (vs. loosing money
| until the big bang)
|
| - while everyone is using Deep Learning for solving the
| problem, I believe Tesla is betting on DL / AI harder than most
|
| On those big points Comma is exactly like Tesla and unlike
| almost everyone else.
|
| I'm not sure which caveats you meant.
| JoshCole wrote:
| What are the shared caveats you are thinking of?
|
| The caveats that stood out to me were that he mentions: lidar
| usage inflating costs, targeting ride sharing as path to
| profitability, and using VC money to fund non-mission goals
| prior to profitability. Tesla doesn't use lidar, is already
| profitable without having targeted ride sharing as the path to
| that, and is already default alive and not dependent on VC
| money.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The comma.ai guys appear to have pivoted to the huge Anybots
| market...
|
| Seems like a very strange choice.
| robocat wrote:
| https://blog.comma.ai/commabody/ The comma body
| is the first "intermediary" for the new mission. It's also the
| pathway to supporting all cars that a human can drive. The
| endgame of comma isn't a box that sits on your windshield, it's
| a robot person that gets in the driver's seat. And it will be
| able to do a lot more than drive.
|
| Appears to me to be a distracting pivot. Especially given the
| "Stay Focused on the Mission" statement in the part 1 article
| (which are worse examples, but still I think relevant).
| ushakov wrote:
| context: https://www.commabody.com
|
| personally, i don't think this is a "strange choice" for a
| company making self-driving vehicles
|
| more like an attempt to try to expand into other markets
| [deleted]
| twelve40 wrote:
| i go to their website comma.ai and for the life of me cannot
| figure out what this is and what they are asking $2000 from me
| for. "Chill driving"?? Maybe a bit of explanation would help? or
| is it even active anymore?
| bm-rf wrote:
| I think the tricky part for them is that the hardware and the
| software need to be marketed differently in order for this to
| be legal. Out of the box, the comma 3 only functions as a dash
| cam. You need to personally load openpilot onto it. I guess
| it's not possible (or wise) to sell a self driving kit
| currently, but selling a dash cam that just so happens to work
| really well with openpilot is.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm surprised the law's developed enough for that, I'd think
| it would be on the (non-)driver either way.
| itchyouch wrote:
| The better option to understand how comma's openpilot works is
| to go to youtube and look up openpilot videos in action.
|
| What they are selling is an ARM board + cameras + CAN bus
| adapters for various vehicles. The stock software engages lane
| centering and longitudinal (gas/brake IF supported) and will
| keep the car lane centered.
|
| For highway driving, it's a huge quality of life improvement.
| jti107 wrote:
| i wonder if they think they can continue growing the self driving
| part with this approach. you will get the hacker types, but dont
| see this going mainstream.
|
| the way they get around regulators, is they are selling the
| hardware and the users are responsible for downloading and
| compiling the software. they support alot of cars but they are
| utilizing vehicle sensors off the can bus and adas vehicle
| commands. if the manufacturer decides to encrypt or restrict this
| then the approach wouldnt work.
| georgehotz wrote:
| There's already 20 million supported cars on the road, that
| number is increasing year over year, and the derivative of that
| number is increasing year over year. Why would we worry about
| this?
| cabyn wrote:
| Is there a reason Ford isn't supported yet? Not enough
| sensors? Are they coming soon?
| georgehotz wrote:
| Ford has two issues:
|
| 1. Older cars have a lockout on steering after 10 seconds
| baked into the EPS firmware.
|
| 2. While newer cars don't have this lockout, adaptive
| cruise control (ACC) is only on high trims. Therefore low
| trims lack radar and (possibly) continuous duty brake
| controllers.
|
| It should be better in a year or two when ACC is standard
| on Ford. ACC is standard on Toyota, Honda, Hyundai,
| Stellantis, and Subaru, hence that's where the effort goes.
| cabyn wrote:
| Makes sense, thanks!
| sushid wrote:
| So if we want the optionality down the road and are
| choosing to drive a Ford, we should opt for the Co-
| Pilot360 Assist 2.0, correct?
| j0hnyl wrote:
| The question is, would it be a crime to build hardware that
| circumvents the encryption/restrictions. If not, they can keep
| going.
| jewel wrote:
| If the software improves beyond a certain point, insurers would
| be willing to take on the risk of this aftermarket approach,
| making it viable to run a business installing this on cars.
| Regular consumers wouldn't have to be hacker types to want this
| or know anything about how it's installed.
|
| For that matter, at a certain point your car insurance might
| give you a big discount to have one installed and subsidize the
| installation and hardware costs. There's a profit motive for
| the first company that does so, being able to offer much
| cheaper rates while still paying out far less for at-fault
| collisions.
| shadycuz wrote:
| I'm really sad a company like Lucid didn't partner with comma to
| take on Tesla.
| georgehotz wrote:
| No need to partner, comma doesn't offer that. The code is open
| source, they can just run it. They still can (and probably
| should from what I've heard about DreamDrive). The port to
| their hardware shouldn't be hard.
| ljk1337 wrote:
| I follow you a long time, 10+ years, you really need to
| change your view of business people, start hiring more.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| If you partnered with aptera down the street I would go nuts!
| (I'm on the wait-list for the car)
| [deleted]
| ushakov wrote:
| > No need to partner, comma doesn't offer that
|
| is there a reason why you don't want offer that?
| kjksf wrote:
| I'm not Hotz but he I've watched a bunch of his interviews
| and the basic problem is that there are no buyers for "no
| bullshit technology".
|
| Pretty much every car maker (GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, VW)
| has already invested in at least one self-driving company.
|
| All those self-driving companies have the same technical
| plan and business strategy: lidar, high-precision maps, it
| has to be level 4 or nothing at all. They're also decent at
| selling that plan via powerpoint, tech demos and test
| deployments.
|
| I think at least 2 years ago Zoox gave a demo to a tech
| journalist (who produced a slick YouTube video out of it)
| and you would think that the technology is almost ready to
| go.
|
| More than a year ago MobileEye CEO gave a talk at a mobile
| conference and showed a video of a car impressively
| navigating busy streets of Jerusalem. You would think that
| the technology is almost ready to go.
|
| Comma, like Tesla, has "no lidars, no maps, ship
| intermediary products and use real data from real drivers
| to improve the technology, cheaply".
|
| To me it's an obviously winning strategy.
|
| To 99% or car CEOs it apparently isn't.
|
| Therefore they are not in the market for comma and won't be
| until it becomes obvious that their approach is failing and
| comma's approach is winning.
|
| So his position is more a sober assessment of lack of clue
| in major car maker execs and he decided that instead of
| playing the game of power point and pretend for the
| unlikely event of a car maker buying from them, he'll focus
| 100% on better engineering and winning in the long term by
| having obviously better product.
| dqpb wrote:
| I had no idea that so many car models have ports for controlling
| steering.
| dqpb wrote:
| > Our average user uses the hardware for 18 months
|
| Why do they stop using it?
| kjksf wrote:
| I think the implication is more than they upgrade to a newer
| version of the hardware. Not that they stop using it.
| allenleein wrote:
| Part 2: https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
| bko wrote:
| I love the idea of Comma. It makes a lot of sense to have an
| after-market instrument to drive your car. There's no reason you
| have to re-build a car. You can probably get very far with just a
| few sensors and connecting to existing car controls. Humans drive
| perfectly well without lidar or a large number of cameras, so a
| bot should be able to as well. You can tell how full of shit a
| company is by the number of tangential things in their mission
| statement. If they want self driving, and all electric, and made
| from recycled parts, and give back 2% to the environment, they're
| prob full of it.
|
| Comma is taking an incremental approach which I like. Most
| driving is done on long monotonous roads going straight. If you
| can eliminate that portion, you'd add huge value.
|
| The other cool thing is that its completely open-source (except
| for code used to train the models). You can install it on your
| own device and run it, or fork it. I read a high percentage of
| users use custom forks of the software. They also have a discord
| where you can talk to the engineers and people working there if
| you have any issues or questions. Imagine calling someone from
| Toyota and just being connected to a auto-engineer?
|
| There's a lot to like about Comma. There are few businesses out
| there with this mindset. I hope other companies take their lead
| and think outside the box and stop worrying about the next round
| and just get some hackers together and build something people
| want.
| Melatonic wrote:
| While I agree that it would be cool to retrofit old cars for
| self driving this is just not really the case at all - human
| vision is incredibly advanced and we have some insane
| processing power behind that vision along with very often
| decades of learning how to harness that vision.
|
| What actually might be interesting would be a "self driving"
| addon that is actually just simply powered by a human remotely
| driving your car. Obviously you would need to add cameras and
| whatnot and it might be priced higher than most would want but
| with properly fast and reliable internet a random person could
| be driving your vehicle from their home while you sleep.
| bko wrote:
| I've asked about this on HN before and was told that latency
| and connectivity is the big issue. I think there is a startup
| doing this. Basically have drivers in mock cars like remote
| Uber drivers. But realistically you would need some hybrid
| approach but that sounds so much worse
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| Yeah, no. Having an underpaid rando who's life is not at
| stake driving my car while I am asleep is not an option.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Humans drive perfectly well without lidar or a large number
| of cameras, so a bot should be able to as well.
|
| This is Tesla, and Comma argument. I think it is a fallacy.
|
| Yes, we can drive with just a pair of eyeballs. But you have to
| realize that the entire road infrastructure is made for humans.
| Signs are made to be easily recognizable by humans, human
| reaction time is taken into account, we have a good idea on
| what is easy to understand and interpret by humans, but we
| don't give a fuck about bots when building roads. It means that
| we start with an unfair advantage. And we are asking bots to be
| better than we are in that environment.
|
| Humans have a remarkable ability to contextualize a situation.
| For example, if we see someone walking on a side lane, marked
| for pedestrians. We know that that person is not a threat, he
| is unlikely to leave his line and therefore we can pass at a
| normal speed. That's unless we see that the person is visibly
| drunk, or maybe he is a small child, in these cases, we will
| slow down, because he may suddenly jump in front of the car.
| Bots probably won't know that, and usually, for safety, they
| will always slow down. Similar situations happen all the time,
| and that would make for a terrible ride, so what should we do?
| Make the system ignore the "drunk man" or "small child" case
| and possibly kill people?
|
| Also one shouldn't forget the communication aspect of driving.
| Drivers have all sorts of way of showing their intentions: turn
| signals obviously, but also subtle movement, you may go forward
| a bit to signal you intend to merge into traffic for instance,
| wait a bit to let someone know he can pass, etc... New drivers
| often struggle with that, which may cause more experienced
| drivers to misread their intention and potentially cause an
| accident, unless these drivers notice that he is indeed a
| newbie... or a bot.
|
| One answer is for bots to compensate their weakness with things
| they are good at. Lightning fast reflexes is a given, but
| sensors are another aspect. Unlike humans, bots are not limited
| to a narrow field of vision and visible light. It is an
| advantage they should use. We humans are insanely good at
| reconstructing a 3D image from our 2D eyes, a good part of our
| brain is dedicated to that, computers can't compete, unless the
| computer is assisted by something like a lidar.
| hattmall wrote:
| I'd be fine with self driving that only went 30mph max. It
| may take twice as long to get placed but so what I can be
| asleep or making a quesadilla.
| bcrl wrote:
| But you can't make a bot that reasons like a human currently.
| They don't understand intent, and I'm pretty sure it will be
| a heck of a long time until that deficiency is overcome.
|
| Having been programming for upwards of 40 years now, there is
| one fundamental truth in programming that all developers need
| to understand and remember: untested code is untrusted code.
| Take all the gazillions of corner cases that occur when
| driving: how many of them do you think are actually tested by
| the various self driving "solutions" on the market right now?
| Do they have a test case for a tire coming off the trailer of
| a transport bouncing down the road? What if a tire is
| bouncing down a road perpendicular to the one your driving?
| What if it's on a sidewalk?
|
| It will take _decades_ before self driving cars are well
| tested. The current approach of falling back to the driver
| for the "hard" cases doesn't work. Spend some time watching
| shows like Mayday that delve into root cause analysis of
| airplane crashes. Accidents happen not because of any one
| single event, but a chain of events interacting that combine
| to result in something horrific. This is also the case in
| nuclear accidents, and in software driven tragedies like the
| Therac 25.
|
| Any software developer working on self driving cars that
| hasn't spent a good deal of time looking back at past system
| failures that have killed humans should bloody well not be
| working on self driving cars. Makings roads easier for bots
| is not a solution to the massive complexity of self driving
| vehicles.
| sushisource wrote:
| > Most driving is done on long monotonous roads going straight.
| If you can eliminate that portion, you'd add huge value.
|
| I don't think this is actually true at all. I mean, it's a nice
| little plus for long road trips I suppose, but how often do you
| do those?
|
| If you can't automate the _whole_ trip, there 's little value.
| I can't go to the bar and have a few drinks and have my car
| drive me home. I can't avoid parking entirely by having my car
| park itself. I can't just _stop owning a car_ because there is
| a circulating supply of autonomous ones.
|
| _Those_ are the real "huge" value adds. Not being able to
| take a nap on a road trip, and those things are still quite far
| off.
| munificent wrote:
| _> I don 't think this is actually true at all. I mean, it's
| a nice little plus for long road trips I suppose, but how
| often do you do those?_
|
| The typical HN reader lives in a dense metro area where
| commute distances are _much_ shorter than average. The
| average commute in the US is 16 miles each way. Millions of
| Americans spend hours on interstates every day.
| giobox wrote:
| To preface this complaint, I'm generally bullish on self
| driving and think it will be solved to a reasonable standard in
| not too many years. With that said, even if this solution drove
| flawlessly I'm not so sure I like idea of cars being driven by
| an optical system that is attached to the windshield with
| suction cups.
|
| Much like we already mandate things like car lights cannot be
| on a moving piece of body work in the USA (to ensure lights
| visible even when boot or trunk open), I wonder if we should
| ensure that the critical sensors for self driving are hard
| mounted to the car securely?
|
| There is inevitably going to be occasions this falls off mid-
| drive - these suction cups are rarely perfect in my experience.
|
| I've always wondered if CarPlay/AndroidAuto one day might
| somehow just reuse existing sensor suites on vehicles to
| provide self driving - this would let the cellphone (which
| increasingly has ML acceleration hardware anyway) still be
| responsible for the driving with cameras that won't fall off.
| bko wrote:
| I've never heard of this issue. I'm not sure what the system
| does, i imagine it disengages same as if the view were to
| suddenly to become obscured. They have a safety model that
| basically says it's not allowed to move the car more than you
| would be able to override. So it's limited which is why you
| have a lot of disengagemenets on curvy roads. I think it's a
| great safety model as you should always be paying attention.
|
| I don't think that problem is even in the top 5 risks of the
| system
| hattmall wrote:
| What's really the point if you still have to be paying
| attention? Having a lane departure and forward collision
| detection is pretty standard now. Im curious what benefits
| this provides beyond that?
| birken wrote:
| Your skepticism is fine, but you are not really educated on
| Comma's product at all.
|
| Comma uses a very strong adhesive for the mount, and then the
| Comma housing slides into that mount very securely. I don't
| think it is any more likely to fall off than your rear view
| mirror is (which also uses an adhesive).
|
| Comma isn't a purely optical system, it also uses the car's
| forward radar information in addition to its cameras.
|
| Comma does not pretend to be a fully self-driving system
| (yet), and in fact it has a camera facing the driver and will
| warn you if you are not paying attention or disengage if you
| are not paying attention long enough. It's a tool to make
| driving easier and safer.
|
| I'm quite confident if you sat in my car while Comma was
| driving you would be shocked at how good it is.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 100x? Amateur. $7 to $1m. (Personal record, unlikely to ever be
| broken (by me)).
| rvz wrote:
| Comma is _still_ one of the rare startups I 've seen that are
| able to enter into this fierce assisted driving systems market
| without the hype, lies and deception and have an actual working
| product, making money with low head count. That's how you do it.
|
| Unlike Tesla's FSD (Fools Self Driving) contraption that is
| getting so much hype for it not working at night and still cannot
| detect the driver's attention properly. Not only they finally
| admitted that they needed an eye tracking driver monitoring
| system, that still doesn't even work either.
|
| The FSD / Autopilot delusion created and boosted by Tesla was
| enough for the regulators to investigate this broken system. I
| don't see any of this in Comma.
| kjksf wrote:
| Your up for a dose of cognitive dissonance.
|
| Hotz doesn't share your Tesla hate.
|
| He said numerous times, publicly, that Tesla will most likely
| win self driving. He doesn't think FSD is Fools Self Driving.
| He thinks FSD is ahead of openpilot.
|
| Hotz positions comma.ai as Android to Tesla's iOS i.e. a
| solution that is a little bit later and a little worse than FSD
| but open to all and better than 3rd or 4th best proprietary
| solution like cruise or waymo.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| > comma is a 13 person company. We are ruthless about hiring the
| best and obsessed with minimizing complexity.
|
| How many is it now? Are you hiring?
| georgehotz wrote:
| We are about 30, and about to move into a new 20k sq ft office
| with production and a datacenter on site.
|
| Yes!: https://comma.ai/jobs
|
| And one more:
| https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1548030295340769280
| shadycuz wrote:
| Can you put me in touch with who runs your Jenkins setup?
|
| I just want to talk shop.
|
| https://twitter.com/shady_cuz/status/1547434211841347586
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| How are you guys able to beat out multi million comp offers
| from the FAANGs? Huge stock grants?
| georgehotz wrote:
| Do you want to throw your life away selling ads? Or do you
| want to build open source software and solve self driving
| cars?
| serialdev wrote:
| I see the appeal. But I gotta say to constraint yourself
| to only California or Rotterdam is kind of missing that
| hacker vibe that cares about results and content. Not
| just hype.
| [deleted]
| biorach wrote:
| Sold!
| learndeeply wrote:
| Article was posted in 2019, in case other people missed it like I
| did.
| Pakdef wrote:
| I need to switch my car so that I could buy a comma.ai and use it
| at its full potential (my Mazda's steering motor isn't powerful
| enough)
| sjcoles wrote:
| Yet on the official Discord just as of a few days ago he was
| begging for sales and pitching for people start reselling the
| devices.
|
| George is bright but not a stable leader. Every month it's some
| new scheme or feature that will "sell 10x the units!"
|
| No, it won't, not with the lack of support and poor attitude from
| Comma. If George wants to sell 10x the units it must be a
| consumer device and treated by Comma as one.
| dubswithus wrote:
| Lack of support and poor attitude? That's the playbook for
| Tesla's FSD. So maybe it can work again?
| ushakov wrote:
| no wonder given George's attitude against business people
|
| in his own words (from Part 2):
|
| > I'd say that 95% of people I met in the hacker world were
| good people; only 5% bad. The business world has this flipped.
| To get ahead in the hacker world you need skills. To get ahead
| in the business world you need psychopathy.
|
| maybe he needs to be more open and not let his negative
| feelings about business people worsen his business
| anton_ai wrote:
| It is not easy to hire a business leader in the AI sector
| that knows something about AI. And here is not even the
| "easy" AI, we are talking about autonomous driving that is
| like the edge of innovation in AI using computer vision and
| reinforcement learning. It is hard to find technical people
| that knows RL, it is much easier for the funder to get better
| in the business side.
| ushakov wrote:
| this might all be true, but how are you going to hire any
| business people anyways, if you have a predisposition that
| "95% of business people are bad and the only good one's are
| psychopaths"
| kjksf wrote:
| That's not what he said.
|
| Slightly re-phrasing, he said: "95% business people are
| bad (at helping companies achieve their goals) and 5% are
| good. The 95% succeed at keeping a job by being
| psychopaths".
|
| I wouldn't fixate on the word "psychopath". He's not
| talking about serial killers, just general sleaziness and
| advancing careers not by being good at their jobs but,
| say, playing office politics well.
|
| For a concrete example, let's consider that Zoox tweet
| about organizing Hispanic something event.
|
| It took at least a few people to do it. Someone had to
| conceive the idea, there had to be a meeting or two
| discussing it, some exec had to approve it, someone had
| to execute it and Zoox paid for it, directly for the
| event and indirectly for the salaries of the people
| involved.
|
| How much all this activity contributed to Zoox solving
| self-driving problem? Zero. Nada.
|
| Did it help justify the continuing employment of the
| people doing it? Yes. Maybe they even got a promotion for
| going "above and beyond" their duties.
|
| There's an argument that those people are more like
| parasites, draining the host company of funds, time and
| attention, advancing their own careers at the expense of
| Zoox.
|
| For context: this happened 3 years ago.
|
| Zoox still hasn't made a single dollar selling a product.
| They still hasn't solved self driving.
|
| They got acqui-hired by Amazon for less money that they
| raised which means that all employees that likely worked
| there for less money and stock options ended up working
| there for just less money.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > no wonder they're in this position
|
| Lean, scrappy, profitable, and ahead? One negative comment on
| HN isn't exactly a crisis. A fluctuation in "profitable"
| wouldn't exactly be a crisis, either, given that the rest of
| this industry looks like a money bonfire.
|
| > maybe he needs to be more open and not let his negative
| feelings about business people worsen his business
|
| Neg harder.
| bko wrote:
| It would be great to sell 10x the units, but theyre profitable
| and chugging along just fine. It's exhausting tho working on
| the same problem for years with incremental steady growth, but
| it's working. I understand the frustration at times.
|
| I imagine some company will finally get their shit together,
| and start buying wholesale and installing in their cars as an
| option. Until that time it'll continue to grow and still be a
| niche product
| ushakov wrote:
| > This as a mission statement makes no sense
|
| isn't that the case for like 90% of SV companies?
|
| these "mission statements" are so opaque you can't tell what
| actual product is
|
| often this is used as a marketing catch-phrase to attract hires,
| eg. "our company has a purpose (other companies don't)"
| metadat wrote:
| Don't miss part 2: https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-
| part-2/
| petters wrote:
| From part 2:
|
| > Nobody will have cars without a safety driver in cities
| anytime soon.
|
| Did not take that long.
| georgehotz wrote:
| The safety driver isn't in the car physically, they "work
| remotely"
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/cruises-robot-car-outages/
| agumonkey wrote:
| any actual user still on this project ? i wonder if it's stable
| or improving
| md2020 wrote:
| It is stable and is improving. I have a Comma 3 in my car and
| use it almost every time I drive. The team is also very active
| in the company's Discord.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Interesting, hotz really went into stealth mode since a few
| years back. Much better I guess.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Should have [2019] in the title.
| zdiscov wrote:
| Really wish George is successful with comma. Fantastic concept
| and one of the sharpest brains to tackle this problem. Love his
| "power to the people" approach with this, in a world where one
| can never even truly own one's own devices anymore.
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