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.<p>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.
Well, Musk said recently that the value of Tesla is 0 without FSD.<p>Does anybody seriously think Karpathy would step down if FSD was really close to be released ??<p>It really starts to feel like Tesla is a huge fraud which is about to be uncovered.
I've really gotten into self driving the past couple years. Watched every video I can find on it. Got a Toyota Rav 4 bought a Comma 2 then later a Comma 3. Really enjoy Comma AI as a product on the highway and some in town. That being said, self driving in city streets is a problem that literally doesn't exist. On highway you can relax, mostly because the car is keeping a straight line and not much is happening. As soon as a car is negotiating stop signs, doing turns, etc it stops being fun and relaxing and starts becoming anxiety inducing.<p>The only thing that needs to be solved fully is highway with auto lane change. That's literally it. And the system needs to do eye tracking like Comma Ai. If your adaptive cruise control makes you put your hand on the wheel it's useless.
This comes after yesterday's news of Tesla letting 229 people go who were working on Autopilot: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/12/tesla-laying-off-229-autopilot-workers-shuttering-san-mateo-office-filing-confirms/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/12/tesla-laying-off-229-autop...</a>.
I shared a desk with Andrej when he was interning at our lab for the summer at the University of Toronto. One of the smartest people I ever connected with about all CS topics. Hopefully he finds what he is looking for and takes a well earned break.
We haven’t seen Musk’s usual “full self driving is coming Xth of next month” tweet in a while now. I really hope it’s Andrej convince my him to stop, if so that is a great win in my book. After his leaving musk may feel the need to sell his company again to show everything is fine. I will not be surprised to see that tweet again in the next few months.
He mentions open source and education which I’m really excited about. There’s been a big lack of accessible from-first-principles resources on this (plenty of abstracted libraries though). Now is a great time to build up excitement among amateurs to learn about this stuff imo. (Right near the super cool text-to-image breakthroughs.) It shouldn’t just be openai and google building these things.
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?<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
I feel like, most commenters are speculating too much around Tesla and their lack of FSD capabilities being the issue. Perhaps Karpathy just felt that the work was too draining and decided to he needed a break. I believe Karpathy has recently been on a lengthy sabbatical.<p>My point is, people leave their jobs for many reasons other than how well the company is doing. At least I hope so.
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.
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.
Even if FSD doesn’t work out Andrej still has an impressive achievement for 5 years.<p>I’m not sure if many people 5 years out of their PhD can say they did anything close to what Andrej did.
It seems like the FSD dream will remain a dream in the forseeable future. I can't really say I'm surprised, but it's a bit disappointing.
hmm, I think the real time aspects of self driving are <i>hard</i>. There is lots of promise with masked language and image modeling, but plenty of work to be done, even for non real time applications.
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?<p>Once again, where are the robot-taxis as promised for release in 2020?