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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

Andrej's argument about more sensors adding entropy strikes me as disingenuous considering that in the next question he then says that Tesla's biggest advantage over everyone else is "the fleet", which clearly introduces orders of magnitude more entropy into the system than anything else. Can you imagine the infrastructure required to gather video from "the fleet" anytime a car sees something unexpected? How about diagnosing what went wrong in that specific instance? How many thousands of these cases do they see everyday?

Given the progress of the FSD "beta" to date, and the fact that Andrej _left_ Tesla, I'd wager that he knows that this approach is a dead end, but he won't say that because he'd get himself in hot water with Elon.

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One is infrastructure entropy and the other is software engineering entropy (we're still talking about data from one type of sensor, just at larger scale).

Most tech startups have 10x+ more problems with the engineering part than the infrastructure/ops part.

Also this is one person's perspective from a large team. His answer might be biased because he's an engineer and I doubt his was the only voice in the debate.

Assuming Karpathy is lying is quite a hot take to disregard his opinion.

No. He makes it clear that he is very convinced about it. There is no relativism, no weasel words or couching in maybes. He could be wrong, of course, but he believes in what he is saying.

> no weasel words

The video starts with him reframing the question instead of answering it

I regularly reframe questions when I think they're not the most interesting. It's a very common thing to do, especially in academia, that doesn't particularly indicate deception.

Here's the thing though, if you're Karpathy and you are 100% confident that Tesla's approach is on the cusp of delivering full L5 autonomous driving, then why leave? Surely, Tesla would become the most valuable company overnight if they could actually do it. He would be showered with accolades when they finally finish it. To leave, _before_ any of that happens, says it all.

Your comparison is a little short sighted because your example would require fleet * additional sensor entropy rather than fleet on itself. And if fleet on itself is adequate then anything extra is simply inefficient at best.

No, my point was that the fleet itself adds entropy to the system because it creates a lot of noise for engineers to track down edge cases and other weird things that happen when you're collecting data from a lot of "sensors", i.e. cars, at once. The exact same argument Karpathy made about why they dumped ultrasonics and radar.

The problem is that so far, Tesla has yet to demonstrate that the fleet _is_ sufficient. IMO, if the fleet was enough to get to L5 autonomous driving, then they would already be there.

You don't understand the term entropy.

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