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Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

I think Karpathy at Tesla has basically unlimited funding, Tesla is developing custom hardware. They've already deployed said hardware in the wild, and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving. We also don't know what his pay situation is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had multimillion dollar bonuses tied to various milestones. I know if I were Elon Musk, I wouldn't want to lose the guy.

So sure, he could leave, but to do what? To start building something similar from scratch somewhere else? He could go to Waymo to find that he went from being the project leader to an underling, and that Waymo is not using the approach he wants to use (he designed the Tesla project, and it's close to pure deep learning). IMO, unless something goes really wrong at Tesla, he will stay, because they're so close to success, surely he wants to see what happens, because the payout will be huge.

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> I think Karpathy at Tesla has basically unlimited funding,

Tesla's R&D spending in their earnings report was ~1.5 billion. That's a small number for unlimited. To contrast, their competitor at GM, with a significantly smaller market cap, is spending 6.2 billion.

> They've already deployed said hardware in the wild, and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving

Can you cite a source for this? Tesla is "probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving" is an absurd claim. Waymo publicly states they're at level 4 autonomy (https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1347286935535017986). Tesla states they're at level 2 autonomy (https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/tesla-full-self-driving-...).

> and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving

Absolutely no one actually working on the autonomous side of the automotive industry, myself included, believes this. Tesla is around the middle-bottom of the pack in terms of actual driverless operating capabilities. They're at the top of the pack only in marketing and reckless deployment before the tech is ready.

If you work for a competitor, you are clearly biased. Show us some evidence, some uncut videos of GM's Cruise or whoever besides Waymo you believe is ahead of Tesla.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sliYTyRpRB8

Waymo presumably also has custom AI hardware from their parent co. (TPUs). Also their own custom lidar hardware.

Are TPUs designed for low-power applications? You don't want to burn lots of power in an electric car.

They have both high precision training TPUs and low-precision low-power edge-TPUs.

I'd actually say they're closer than Waymo to FSD, given that Waymo's solution relies on much more expensive tech and high fidelity 3D mapping. To my mind you're not true FSD until your car can drive literally anywhere an average human could, and I'm not sure that's possible with Waymo's solution until they've mapped the entire world.

You don’t get to be closer to FSD just because you have a grander vision of driving everywhere a human could. They have to actually demonstrate it. It’s been years and Tesla still doesn’t have the confidence to let drivers take their hands off the wheel.. you know, the true test of self driving. So how exactly are they close?

I didn't say "close", I said closer. Full self-driving (e.g. "Level 5") is driving everywhere a human can. I have doubts that Waymo will ever get to Level 5 without 3D mapping the entire world, which (to me) sounds like a somewhat intractable problem. There is a lot of world, and it is constantly changing.

The problem here is the "level" system everyone has been told is the standard, which heavily implies that if you're at "3" while someone else is at "2", then you're closer to "5". This isn't really true though because solutions at Level X don't necessarily scale/work at Level Y. I dislike using the level system for this reason.

I think Tesla is closer because they are certainly getting there[1], and I believe their model (relying entirely on CV) is the one that has the greatest likelihood of stretching to FSD (Level 5 autonomy). Mostly because there is only one system we're aware of that can achieve FSD (humans), and the sensory package there is entirely visual.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_zTZjCCoxo

> I have doubts that Waymo will ever get to Level 5 without 3D mapping the entire world

Waymo is not trying to get to L5 at all. They are a strictly L4 technology and their focus is clearly on servicing where the market is, metropolitan cities.

L5 is a pipe dream for anyone; it's a moving target no one can ever reach. It essentially means the car can drive anywhere, in all conditions and without the driver needing to take over at all. So it really means Tesla can't declare FSD as "done" until it works for everyone, everywhere and in every condition. How close do you think they are for that to happen? Does that also mean if it encounters a unique situation and gives up, their L5 claims fall flat? Given their current poor performance [1], they have a long way to go to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel, so I'm not holding my breath here (vision stack or not).

The real end game for self driving is L4 because that's what you can reasonably promise to your users. That it works in a defined, tested area and when required conditions are met. This is why literally every SDC company is L4-only, they never promise L5. Either Tesla is focusing on the wrong problem instead of providing value to its paying customers or they are blatantly misleading customers by promising "L5 by the end of the year" every year.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=antLneVlxcs

That's a reasonable stance, but we're talking about FSD here. Your opinion about whether that's possible at all isn't particularly germane to whether or not Tesla or Waymo is closer.

And yes, I would say my bar is a little lower than yours seems to be, as hinted at in my first comment. As long as the system can respond with a solution that is equivalent or better than what a human driver would do the vast majority of the time, I see that as FSD.

Your lower bar is reasonable (though hard to quantify), but that's not what Tesla is promising and marketing when they say L5. They can't say L5 and then qualify it with "works only vast majority of the time", at which point it's no longer L5.

It seems like your bar is lower for Tesla (you're okay if it doesn't work always, yet you consider it true self driving), but extremely high for Waymo - who are actually fully driverless - just because it's geofenced. Sounds like you're not applying the same standards to both.

It's the same standard: Successful FSD is measured by automated driving (without any human intervention) that is equal to or better than humans (as measured by accidents/fatalities per mile) anywhere humans typically drive (e.g. where infrastructure for driving cars has been deliberately constructed).

Maybe it looks like my standard is tailored to fit Tesla, but it's actually not, it is merely the behavior I would want if I ever purchased a self-driving car. Specifically, I want a self-driving RV where I can program in anywhere I want to go and it will take me there.

I think Tesla's approach can easily get us there in my lifetime. I'm skeptical of Waymo's.

What counts as "vast majority"? Does the severity of failures in those cases where it doesn't match a human matter?

It's still pretty vague

Check my parallel reply for a bit of clarification.

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