
Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video] - kiddz
https://livestream.tesla.com/
======
sairahul82
Karpathy's presentation is really good. Watch it later if you get some time.
The key points are

\- Telsa is using fleet for learning (Fleet learning). This has 3 components,
a. Trigger infrasture that collects the kind of data telsa is looking for
training. The rational here is we don't need massive amounts of same kind of
data but needs right kind of data for training neural networks correctly. b.
Data Engine which learns from these examples. c. Shadow mode where they deploy
the learned model and test how its doing in real world and iterate this
process.

\- Drivers are themselves acting as labelers and tesla is in a unique position
to take advantage of this.

\- People drive vision only. Visual recognition is essential for autonomy.
Lidar has much less information than vision, for example to identify the thing
on the road is a plastic bag, lidar provides few points. But vision gives more
data for telling this.

~~~
sytelus
Karpathy is great at presenting executive-101. However self-driving is much
much more than image classification. You have a time component, you need to
integrate information as it comes in to meaningful state (aka SLAM) and make
sequential decisions that has potential to kill people. This is still
_unsolved research problem_ unlike punny ImageNet classification. Karpathy
could have easily spent entire day talking about current state of the art and
how they have improved on it but instead we got Deep Learning 101. I hope he
didn't intentionally used this tactic to avoid talking about the elephant in
the room. It seems they are hell bent on vision-based end-to-end learning
which vast majority of experts would agree that is far away in the future. So
this whole thing is quite bold and if they really make this happen in 1yr3mo
then I'd say you should dump your entire 401K in buying Tesla stock.
Collecting data is actually more trivial part of this problem.

~~~
alyx
Good overview, I share your opinion.

Tesla is betting BIG on NNs.

In the presentation they say that we have NNs in our brain. Which is why we
can look at one photo of a dog, and distill enough identifying information in
order to spot the breed from then on. Training sample of 1.

Curiously though, they than say that NNs don't work like our brains do, and
require A LOT of training data from all angles, etc. Training sample of N.

The presentation doesn't actually show, how they plan to train a single NN to
encompass all the knowledge for self driving. In particular, the looooooong
tail. But maybe they'll have independent models, say based on "observed"
conditions, which swap in and out ... based on more NN logic.

But at the end of the day, there is no known (to me) examples, of NNs even
approaching human ability. Tesla is bascially hoping we will believe, they
will be the first to show this capability of NNs.

Let's wait and see, 2020 is not that far away.

~~~
monk_e_boy
> require A LOT of training data from all angles

Also, we learn things outside of our cars. I ride a bike, this gives me
insight into what bike riders will do on the road.

I have kids, so I know a kid on the pavement will be more risky /
unpredictable than an adult.

I drove down a single track road today and met another car coming towards me.
We stopped, then he started to reverse, there was a passing place behind him.
Another car pulled up behind him, so I then reversed back into a field to let
the cars past. This sort of thing happened maybe six times today as I drove
around. Not at all surprising, not even noteworthy enough for any of the
drivers to acknowledge even a flick of the finger in thanks. Just part of
driving here.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Hmm maybe the problem is actually interacting with humans naturally, on the
road, so self-driving is really human-style general AI

~~~
threeseed
This is actually the aspect that really doesn't get discussed enough. Imagine
these scenarios:

a) Roadworks and a guy tells you to stop or waves you through. Or asks you to
drive slowly. Or points to a direction that he wants you to go.

b) Woman on the side of the road is waving their arms about because her small
child is crawling on the road trying to chase a toy.

If self driving cars can't look another person in the eye and identity their
intent then there are going to be a lot of unforeseen problems.

~~~
zaroth
What's the more interesting question is not whether there will be corner cases
where self-driving fails, but when the average performance is so much better
than humans that AI saves 10s if not 100s of lives every day, but that's still
a reality where AI driving software could be actively out there involved in
the deaths of a single digit number of _different_ people a day or week.

Do you deploy that build or not?

~~~
monk_e_boy
For sure deploy if the numbers are right. It's the edge cases that are
interesting.

Cameras are fine in the day, but when I struggle to see at night, in the rain,
with spray from cars, glare from on coming traffic... that's where I would
LOVE to have a lidar assisted heads up display. How Tesla think they can do
better with just cameras compared to another car with cameras AND lidar just
baffles the mind.

~~~
sliken
Not better in absolute terms, but better in terms of the best car for a
certain price. Sure a $200k car with redundant LIDAR and horribly inefficient
aerodynamics because a giant spheres on top (like weymo) might be better than
a $50k with just cameras.

But the hard part is the software, and it's unclear that the added complexity
of lidar + camera will allow the software to be better than just cameras.

As an example a recent study at Cornell shows that a stereo pair of cameras
mounted high up behind the windshield provided similar quality 3d data to
LIDAR. Search for "Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap
in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving" or the more consumer friendly
"Elon Musk Was Right: Cheap Cameras Could Replace Lidar on Self-Driving Cars,
Researchers Find".

Seems much easier to work on a stereo video stream that includes 2D, color,
and extracted 3D features than trying to achieve sensor fusion with lidar +
video. Especially if you want to make full use of color for things like brake
lights, traffic signals, color/markings of an ambulance, school bus, lane
markings, and other important details that are invisible to LIDAR.

Especially consider that if weather is terrible and the camera vision is so
bad that only 5mph is safe. If LIDAR can see significantly better, do you
allow it to drive at 50 mph because it can see 200 feet? For just social
reasons it seems like driving as much like a human as possible is going to be
best until all cars are autonmous.

------
Traster
I'm sorry but I'm finding it really difficult to watch this and match up what
the engineer is saying to what Elon Musk is saying.

For example, the engineer says the custom ASIC does 144 TOps for 2 chips vs
the NVidia drive Xavier - does 21 TOps. Okay, well yeah I expect your custom
ASIC does have a nice performance advantage over the equivalent GPU. at 3.5x
advantage probably seems reasonable. Cue Elon Musk:

"At first seems improbable, how could it be that Tesla, who has never designed
a chip before would design the best chip in the world but that is objectively
what has occured. Not the best by a small margin, the best by a huge margin".

Mate, it's a dot product with some memory attached, and not a single detail
your half hour deep dive has gone into suggests anything other than a bog
standard ASIC.

"All the cars being produced right now have all the hardware necessary for
full self-driving"

And this is where I'm totally lost. I want to believe! But he's lied so many
times now. This man is sucking the credibility out of every engineer in the
room. Don't repeat the same lie twice.

~~~
dragontamer
> For example, the engineer says the custom ASIC does 144 TOps for 2 chips vs
> the NVidia drive Xavier - does 21 TOps. Okay, well yeah I expect your custom
> ASIC does have a nice performance advantage over the equivalent GPU. at 3.5x
> advantage probably seems reasonable. Cue Elon Musk:

Here's my issue with that. The on-chip SRAM is only 32MB, and the RAM is
LPDDR4 rated at only 68GB/s.

Assuming a dot-product (multiply + add) over INT8 data, that's a limitation of
2-operations per 68GB/s (that the RAM moves at). Or 136 GIOPS (Giga-integer8
operations per second). You're limited by RAM, based on what I've seen in the
presentation.

Unless their neural net is 32MB and fits entirely in on-chip SRAM. That seems
unlikely to me...

~~~
shaklee3
Nvidia already responded:

""Tesla was inaccurate in comparing its Full Self Driving computer at 144 TOPS
of processing with Nvidia Drive Xavier at 21 TOPS," a spokesman said in an
email. "The correct comparison would have been against Nvidia's full self-
driving computer, Nvidia Drive AGX Pegasus, which delivers 320 TOPS for AI
perception, localization and path planning." The statement also contends that
"while Xavier delivers 30 TOPS of processing, Tesla erroneously stated that it
delivers 21 TOPS. "

~~~
Robotbeat
From what I understand, Pegasus consumes about 500Watts, compared to under 100
Watts for Tesla's FSD computer. Elon in particular emphasized the performance
per watt (as it's always possible to cram more chips to increase performance
if you ignore cost and power consumption).

The comparison made in the video: 500Watts for an hour consumes about 2-3
miles of range. In a city in slow traffic, going 12mph, that's a significant
range reduction. So you might have a 10% improvement in range for the Tesla
ASIC in low speed conditions.

~~~
dragontamer
Its incomparable though. The Pegasus has far more compute power.

Just because the Pegasus has 500W worst-case TDP doesn't mean that its average
case would be 500W constant. If you scale back your code and idle parts of the
GPU, you can drop the energy cost arbitrarily.

At least, that's how GPUs on desktops work. They only use a ton of power if
you give them a ton of work. Write your code in an energy-efficient manner,
and the 2080 Ti will drop down to 20W, or scale all the way up to 300W.

[https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-
rtx-2080...](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-
founders-edition,5805-10.html)

Modern chips idle very well. With the right code, the Pegasus could be tuned
to only use 100W (assuming good enough programmers). But Tesla's chip will
NEVER be able to scale above 100W.

~~~
Robotbeat
Pegasus's chip is more general purpose and doubtless has far more general
purpose compute power. But that's irrelevant. What's relevant is Tesla's chip
is optimized specifically for their NN pipeline whereas Pegasus is based off
of general purpose GPU architecture, thus Tesla's chip achieves a better TOPS
per Watt than Pegasus. And it'd be strange if it didn't.

"Tesla's chip will NEVER be able to scale above 100W" okay, based on what?
Tesla has a higher performance chip in the pipeline right now, and they
could've used more silicon to achieve more TOPS if they needed it.

EDIT: Pegasus has 500W at 320 TOPS. Tesla's has 72 Watts at 144TOPS. Thus
Tesla's chip, because it's focuses specifically on Tesla's NN pipeline, is
about to get almost 4 times to performance per watt of the Pegasus and is much
cheaper. Tesla's NN chip wouldn't help your video game, and Tesla isn't
intending to compete in all the markets Nvidia operates in.

~~~
dragontamer
> Pegasus has 500W at 320 TOPS. Tesla's has 72 Watts at 144TOPS.

Theoretical TOPS which can only ever execute within the 32MB SRAM that Tesla
has created. Otherwise, Tesla's compute chip is stuck at 68 GBps LPDDR4 RAM.
Pretty slow.

Pegasus uses HBM2 chips at 500GBps. Pegasus will be able to efficiently
compute neural networks that are larger than 32MB in size.

Tesla is making big bets about this tiny 32MB SRAM. Bits and pieces of the CNN
can fit in there, but almost certainly not the entire neural network.

You're right that this is a specialized chip. But even for NN / Deep Learning
inference, it seems a bit underpowered to me from a RAM perspective

~~~
Robotbeat
Specmanship doesn't matter. What matters is how fast it's able to execute on
the task at hand and for what cost in terms of purchase price and energy.

Nvidia's offering can be really good, and so can Tesla's.

------
RivieraKid
I watch Tesla fairly closely from both the bull and bear sides. In short, I
don't believe Tesla is anywhere close to Waymo. They won't achieve FSD in
2020.

It's important to see this event in the context of their significant demand
and cash problems. Even enthusiastic Tesla investors like Galileo Russell
suggested that Tesla is in a cash crunch and should raise money. Which hints
at the main mystery about Tesla, why haven't they raised money yet?

Take a moment and think about _why_ are they doing this event now. Elon is
setting a stage for a capital raise, he's pitching the autonomy narrative
after the Model 3 cash cow narrative failed. They're trying to convince
investors (and customers) to give them money because money-printing autonomous
taxi service is coming next year.

Also, think about why basically everyone except Tesla uses Lidars. Is it
because they're stupid or because Tesla _cannot_ use Lidars even if they
wanted to?

P.S.: Nvidia issued a statement saying that Tesla's claims about their chip
are incorrect: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-
inaccura...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccurate-
in-self-driving-comparison-2019-04-22)

Edit: In 2012, Waymo reached the milestone of handling 8 100-mile routes,
specifically chosen to capture the full complexity of driving. I doubt Tesla
is currently at that level. Source:
[https://events.technologyreview.com/video/watch/dmitri-
dolgo...](https://events.technologyreview.com/video/watch/dmitri-dolgov-waymo-
autonomous-cars/)

~~~
antpls
If I were a billionaire and I wanted to change the world, I would put pressure
on existing companies by creating a competing company and pretending
extraordinary achievements.

Truth or not, failure or not, Musk moves forward the hopes and expectations,
and I'm thankful just for that.

I don't see how we can blame him for taking position

~~~
Traster
What you're describing is securities fraud.

~~~
Robotbeat
Saying what your future goals are, while clearly and repeatedly reminding
people of your past history of being late on those goals, is the opposite of
fraud.

------
2bitencryption
...out of all the things I expected to see from a Tesla stream, I definitely
did not expect a 25 minute discussion on the cost of 32bit additions, dot
products, sram bandwidth, and chip design, at the level of a third year
college hardware course.

~~~
DeonPenny
I keep saying this he knows what he doing. You can tell he knows what's
happening. Which is rare for a CEO to know this level of detail.

~~~
selectodude
Which might explain why he's a crummy CEO. If your job is to strategize for
the entire company and you're busy learning the minutiae that you spend a
_lot_ of money for other people to worry about, maybe you need to consider
using your time a little better. If you want to build neural nets, keep your
stock, fire yourself and go build neural nets.

~~~
outworlder
> If your job is to strategize for the entire company and you're busy learning
> the minutiae that you spend a lot of money for other people to worry about,
> maybe you need to consider using your time a little better

This is what everyone that is not Tesla or SpaceX are doing. And have been
doing for a long time. If the CEO is not an engineer at heart, what are they?

I seriously doubt Elon Musk has more engineering knowledge than the people he
hires on their specific fields. However, he can make pretty well informed
strategic decisions if he knows WTF the engineers are talking about without
taking their word – not even that, as explanations have to be dumbed down.

This is not a new thing. Bill Gates was like that (1). Steve Jobs was no dummy
and had an engineering background, but not at the same level – he did parter
with a genius engineer, however.

I think Musk is doing the right thing.

> Which might explain why he's a crummy CEO

That's quite debatable, I'd say. Isn't he getting results?

(1) [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-
rev...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/)

~~~
cjhopman
> This is what everyone that is not Tesla or SpaceX are doing.

If your goal is to make money, I'd follow anyone but Tesla or SpaceX's
example.

~~~
breakyerself
How is SpaceX a bad example? They've managed to undercut everyone in the space
launch sector while bringing in a larger profit per launch.

~~~
cjhopman
SpaceX isn't public or open about their financials, but there's a lot of
evidence that they are simply losing money. Ex. they were raising a lot of
money last year, profitable companies don't do that. Also read
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18129539/spacex-
falcon-9-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18129539/spacex-
falcon-9-rocket-water-landing-valuation-investors)

~~~
breakyerself
Yeah that article seems like a lot of tea leaf reading to me. All evidence
points to SpaceX building orbital rockets cheaper than just about anyone else
before reuse, but even if not reuse should drop their costs well below anyone
else until blue origin comes online or until ULA decides to shake off the
crust of old age. It's not at all surprising that investors are told not to
expect to take a profit for 15 years because SpaceX is focused on growth and
development. I wouldn't expect them to reinvest any less than 100% of their
profits at this time. It makes just as much sense to assume they raised money
to keep development moving at the pace they want which wasn't fast enough
using profits alone.

Despite the fact that I own a Model 3 and own shares in Tesla I often find the
critics make good points and just hope for the best anyways because I want
electric cars to take over and I want self driving cars to develop sooner than
later because driving is dangerous and tedious.

The SpaceX hate seems much less justified to me. SpaceX has been building
launching, landing, and reusing rockets for years now. They've ushered in a
new lower cost space age.

------
grecy
Holy cow Elon said _a lot_ of things that will _drastically_ change the world
in the next 2-3-5 years. I think it's very, very clear they've been doing _a
lot_ of stuff behind that scenes that nobody has given them credit for over
these last 5 years. Everyone thought they were just throwing everything at the
Model 3 ramp and doing nothing else, but it turns out the opposite is true.

At the end Elon said autonomy is basically their entire expense sheet!

Whether or not Tesla can pull it off is obviously going to be an enormous
topic of debate with haters and lovers on each side.

This is super, super exciting. I'm going to grab the popcorn and enjoy
watching Tesla try. Whether they succeed or fail I admire them aiming so high,
and planning so far ahead.

~~~
sharadov
And I think they are far ahead of the game compared to anyone else w.r.t
autonomous driving, they have a fleet sending them data back real time.

~~~
gamblor956
This is definitely not true. The engineer explicitly stated that Tesla only
gets data when trigger conditions are met (and that this was in fact always
the case), so most of the miles that Tesla drivers have been driving was
actually never even sent back to the mothership for use in ML training.

IOW, despite Elon claiming for years that they're ahead because of the
"millions of miles" of free data collection by Tesla drivers, it turns out
once the engineers on the ground actually speak...they're actually pretty far
behind on the data front, and most of the data they are getting is the same
safe routes over and over again since they're not trying to put Autopilot into
novel situations to acquire new data or test the ML algorithm's capabilities
to handle unique/novel situations (like trucks turning in the highway, or
freeway dividers).

~~~
dreaminvm
They cherry-pick rare cases and use their fleet to get more examples of these
situations. This seems like the right approach given more miles following the
same car in a straight line is pretty useless.

My takeaway from the presentation is that Tesla will perform better than other
companies in this space (although I don't know enough about Waymo to comment)
due to the following:

-You want a large dataset (Tesla and many companies have this and can simulate) -You want a varied/diverse dataset (Tesla and many companies have this and can simulate)--the point here is simulations for simple cases work (you can only simulate when you know), but for complex ones are close to the difficulty of actual FSD -You want a real dataset (Tesla is the only company who can say this and can say they have data on how X00Ks of drivers will handle these situations)

~~~
gamblor956
My point was that it appears that Tesla _doesn 't have a large and varied
dataset._ It has a small and pre-selected data set, since the cars only
transmit data when pre-determined triggers are fired. Thus, it doesn't matter
how many 1000s of drivers Tesla "has" or how many "situations" they're in,
since it's not actually collecting data from most of these situations.

And Autpilot's performance (including its numerous regressions) suggests very
strongly either that it doesn't have a very large data set, or else that it
has a large data set of everyone doing roughly the same thing almost all of
the time. These are the two most logical explanations for Autopilot's tendency
to veer toward freeway dividers even (especially?) after updates.

~~~
Joky
> My point was that it appears that Tesla doesn't have a large and varied
> dataset. It has a small and pre-selected data set,

I don't thinks it is a fair characterization: first the notion of "large" is
fairly subjective. But more importantly the fact that they collect data on
pre-determined triggers is just a guarantee that the dataset is not over-
fitted (let say to the 280 and 101 in the Bay Area and to Elon's commute in
LA) and instead has good coverage of the world.

Their capabilities of triggering on situation allows them to grow the dataset
quickly in a supervised way. It is all about the granularity of these
triggers, imagine that you can express "collect situation in tunnels with jerk
higher than X m/s3" or "collect all lane change abort in snow condition", ...
In the next 24h you get data from all over the world and this data is
automatically tagged and classified by the neural net.

------
Animats
So far, half an hour from the head of IC design. Nice special purpose IC and
board. Dual everything for redundancy. Wide special purpose neural net
evaluation. 100 watts for the compute system. Code signing. Shipping in new
Model 3 cars since last 10 days.

"All we need to do is improve the software" \- Musk [12:07 PDT]

LIDAR "unnecessary" \- Musk [12:13 PDT]

Computer vision guy is now speaking.

Recognizes "driveable space", not just obstacles. Video shown, but just for a
freeway. This is crucial to safety. Need to see this is a cluttered
environment.

~~~
isoprophlex
"LIDAR is a fool's errand. Everyone relying on LIDAR is doomed." edit: beat me
to it

~~~
vasilipupkin
it snowed a few weekends ago in Chicago, my autopilot turned off because snow
covered up the cameras. So I am not buying all this "self driving with no
lidar" brouhaha

~~~
slg
Doesn't LIDAR has similar problems with precipitation? Regardless of what
solution proves to be the best, there is going to be a decent amount of time
between when a self driving car can handle most scenarios and when it can
handle all possible scenarios.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Here's a snow cover map of North America on a random day in January:

[https://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_v3/ims_gif/ARCHIVE/U...](https://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_v3/ims_gif/ARCHIVE/USA/2019/ims2019025_usa.gif)

Here is Europe and Asia on the same day:

[https://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_v3/ims_gif/ARCHIVE/E...](https://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_v3/ims_gif/ARCHIVE/EuAsia/2019/ims2019025_asiaeurope.gif)

For someone who lives in or close to that white part, "most scenarios"
includes snow. Arguably for Level 4 autonomous cars in those areas, you either
need to fully disable autonomy in September and enable it again in late April,
or you'll need to handle snow.

~~~
slg
You are comparing two different things. Old snow on the ground (your images)
is not the same thing as active or recent snow accumulation on the vehicle
(the original comment). It is completely reasonable for the car to disable
autonomy due to snow accumulation until someone clears it off the vehicle.
That says nothing about the autonomy of the vehicle with snow cover on the
ground.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I'm assuming Level 4 is what Musk means by Full Self Driving. The bar to be
passed is then

"No driver attention is ever required for safety (...) self-driving is only
supported in limited circumstances (e.g. geofencing), and when these
circumstances are no longer met the vehicle must be able to safely abort the
trip, e.g. park the car, if the driver does not retake control."

How would that work if you're out driving on the highway, and it starts
snowing hard so the car can't see anything? Just park on the highway?

If your car can't safely handle such a scenario, the automous feature would
have to be "season-fenced" in addition to geofenced.

~~~
slg
It isn’t like it all cameras simultaneously go from 0% obstruction to 100%
obstruction instantaneously. The car should pull off the highway and park or
at least pull to the shoulder and park once it has identified decreased
visibility to an extent that might impact safety.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
It kinda is though. Snow deposition is a function of surface temperature,
which is uniform across the sensor. Hit the wrong initial temp when you enter
a blizzard, and deposition takes your vision in seconds. It can be hard enough
to see out the windshield which has heating, wipers and anti-freeze wiper
fluid fighting for it.

~~~
slg
Do you realize how far you have moved the goalposts during this conversation?
You started out with the suggestion that they "fully disable autonomy in
September and enable it again in late April" and now you are talking about
situations with "the wrong initial temp when you enter a blizzard".

I will simply refer back to my initial comment in this thread: "there is going
to be a decent amount of time between when a self driving car can handle most
scenarios and when it can handle all possible scenarios". Blizzards are not in
the "most scenarios" group. Barring emergencies, no one should be driving in a
blizzard let alone an autonomous car.

~~~
derpherp
I don't think OP has moved the goalposts at all. LIDAR can work in snow but
cameras get covered. And yes you are right, there will be a decent time
between testing in some basic scenarios and testing in all scenarios. But I do
not understand why Mr. Musk is trying to reinvent the wheel and rely only on
vision when LIDAR has already shown that it works better.

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-
glaciolog...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-
glaciology/article/lidar-measurement-of-snow-depth-a-
review/4419DF5C778946103080CB6187D434C0/core-reader)

~~~
dragonwriter
> But I do not understand why Mr. Musk is trying to reinvent the wheel and
> rely only on vision when LIDAR has already shown that it works better.

Because he's sold a bunch of cars (and a bunch of stock in the company selling
the cars) without LIDAR with the explicit claim they are hardware-ready for
full self-driving.

------
jacquesm
The thing I don't get about Tesla is why they keep heaping more on their plate
rather than _just_ (for large values of just) re-doing the motive power bit.
That alone is a massive challenge and it is not something they've licked at
economies of scale that allow a $10K vehicle to be brought to market, which is
what it will take to really make this a success.

Every extra they tack on to the base product is one they will be expected to
deliver on as well diverting attention from the main problem they are dealing
with, which may in the longer term leave open enough room for the competition
to wiggle through.

Sure, autonomy is a big deal, but it is _also_ something that will once
cracked be an instant commodity and there is a lot of money and talent focused
on that particular problem, which is surprisingly hard to do well.

If Tesla ends up going under because of one of the side shows (Solar City,
autonomy, Power Wall etc) that would be a serious loss.

~~~
grecy
I think it's related to who Musk is, and the kinds of things he wants to
achieve.

SpaceX isn't trying to just do what has always been done and just make it 5 or
10% cheaper. That's boring. SpaceX is completely turning the launch industry
on it's head.

Tesla is the same. Elon isn't interested in making "just" an electric car. He
wants to change the world, and electric cars that drive themselves will do
that.

Can he do it soon? I'm not an expert, I don't know. But damn it's exciting to
watch.

~~~
lutorm
The purpose of Tesla is to save the world from global warming, though. I'm not
sure self-driving is that relevant compared to the electric propulsion part.

~~~
ginko
If anything it'd be detrimental since it would allow more people to drive
longer and more often.

------
fossuser
Interesting pieces:

\- First principles hardware design of focused self driving computer (many
times better than any competing existing hardware). Already shipping in all
newly produced cars. Currently working on next gen that will be 3x better to
ship in a couple years.

\- Lidar is an unnecessary mistake that competitors are making that won't
succeed (too expensive, need too many, unnecessary).

\- Real world fleet testing is critical to success, simulations are not good
enough since there are too many unknown unknowns in the real world. Tesla uses
simulations too, but nobody else comes close on real world fleet testing.

~~~
sytelus
> Lidar is an unnecessary mistake that competitors are making

This is very controversial and rest of the industry thinks exact opposite,
many even claiming that Tesla is being irresponsible and even delusional in
trying to do autonomy without lidar. The main points I have heard in favor of
lidar are that computer vision is very flaky not only in suboptimal weather
but even in good weather. Cameras are simply no where close to in performance
in dynamic range, rapid adaptation, focusing etc as human eye. Imagine car
going under the shaded road with rapid changes between bright light and shade.
The likelihood that your depth estimation will get messed up is very high. Of
course, night driving becomes highly questionable as well. In additional the
long range depth estimation is very flaky with stereo vision right now and a
topic of research for mono-vision. If you want to retreat to level-4 only and
that too with conservative speed, weather etc then may be vision+radar more
doable?

~~~
fossuser
They pair it with a forward facing radar which is inexpensive and good at
depth perception.

Elon predicts all competitors will eventually drop lidar. He mentions it's
expensive, but also not as good in a lot of cases (and all roads/signs are
designed for vision).

He argues that getting vision to work is a prerequisite for getting self-
driving to work and once you have it working, lidar is worthless (and
unnecessary).

~~~
gamblor956
Elon Musk is noted for his premature optimization.

Case in point: both the Gigafactory (vastly overbuilt for the quantity of
batteries actually produced) and the Alien Dreadnought (vastly overbuilt for
the number of cars Tesla current produces...assuming that Tesla is ever able
to get the fancy automation working). Boring Co digging a two-mile tunnel in
West LA without bothering to learn how to pour concrete smoothly, or to make
the "rails" the proper width, or learning about ventilation, or access
points....

~~~
Fricken
It's easier to optimize a working system than it is to get an optimized system
working.

~~~
StavrosK
So when are they going to get them working?

~~~
Fricken
Beats me. It could be a while before we see anything that can compete with
conventional rideshare at scale.

------
iandanforth
Tesla: "We have a global network of cameras that can be queried to find
anything on or near roads and send back photos of it."

Every law enforcement entity on the planet: _drool_

~~~
xedeon
It was pointed out that All data is anonymized.

~~~
iandanforth
That's fine. I don't care who's driving the car carrying the camera. I care
about what the camera can see. If you've ever been sent an Amber alert for a
local child abduction it often comes with a description of the car that the
suspect is driving. If I'm in law enforcement I'd much rather get an emergency
warrant to ask Tesla to query the network to find that kind of car in a given
geographic area.

~~~
grey-area
Too late.

The future is here, and computers will see _everything_ in excruciating detail
via multiple planes of information. The power you consume, the data you send,
the money you spend, the media you watch, the words you write, where you go.

It’s all out there in the world. There’s no taking it back, though we may be
able to legislate about its use.

------
localhost
At the tail end of Karpathy's presentation, he said something that reminded me
of why Peter Norvig decided to join Google: because that's where the data is.
In Tesla's case, they have a unique and likely accelerating advantage in
having the best source of data up on which to train their models. I think this
forms the basis of an enduring moat relative to their other competitors, none
of which are collecting data at the same scale.

~~~
justapassenger
Is Tesla collecting that data? I've looked at their earnings and didn't see
any big expenses related to datacenters. Amount of data they would need to
store and process is massive, that would for sure show up in earnings, as one
of the biggest costs.

------
netinstructions
While you're waiting for the main event to start, here are some recent
interviews with Elon about self-driving cars. He's _very_ confident.

"To me right now, this seems 'game, set, and match,'" Musk said. "I could be
wrong, but it appears to be the case that Tesla is vastly ahead of everyone."

I am eager to see what they unveil today.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI)

[https://ark-invest.com/research/podcast/elon-musk-podcast](https://ark-
invest.com/research/podcast/elon-musk-podcast)

~~~
dforrestwilson
Hmmm so then why is Tesla ranked last for autonomous driving by third party
researchers?

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR7KHlq-
ThAhUPHzQIHYU2DqEQzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibtimes.com%2Felon-musks-
tesla-surprisingly-fails-lead-autonomous-driving-
technology-2786913&psig=AOvVaw1gWIsj1jFDhjHpGWy2DVii&ust=1556044547357367)

And Elon has a long history of making false claims about Tesla’s progress. For
example in 2015 and 2016 he claimed that Teslas would be fully self-driving by
2018.

So why shouldn’t we be skeptical?

[https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-
str...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-strategy-is-
outdated-and-possibly-dangerous/)

~~~
DeonPenny
But Navigant curriculum was very unscientific. There no actual quantitive
reason Tesla is worse. Is was based mainly on business factors like go-to
market strategy and vision.

~~~
navigatesol
As opposed to the "scientific", "quantitative" reasoning behind Tesla being
the leaders in FSD?

~~~
DeonPenny
Yes absolutely saying Tesla who gets camera data from it's a half million car
doesn't give it an advantage is crazy. That not even including the fact it's
the only company who can do its strategy. Google would need to get constant
data and GM and legacy automakers would need sensor suites on all it's cars
yesterday.

No one knows if Tesla strategy will work because they don't have the data
collection in place.

~~~
dforrestwilson
Neither does Tesla which makes it a moot point.

They have no way to store or transmit the massive data you are describing off
the platform do they?

My understanding is that they have very limited storage and transmit onboard.

~~~
DeonPenny
Based on their talk today and Andrew previous talk where he shows explicitly
tools that do just that download data constantly is exactly what they do.
[https://vimeo.com/274274744](https://vimeo.com/274274744)

I mean saying a phone can upload videos to youtube but a can can't to tesla is
a weird ledge to stand on. Even their windshield wipers work based on sending
video data to tesla to be learned on.

------
iandanforth
I really really don't want Tesla to die. I think it's an important company for
a sustainable future. Failures in autonomous driving could easily turn into
the straw that breaks the camels back.

If you call something "autopilot" and promote it as if it will drive for you
and then it ends up killing dozens of people ... that's where successful class
actions come from.

(I obviously don't want people to die either.)

~~~
gambiting
And I don't want them to succeed because they are actively hostile towards 3rd
party repairs and car modifications, plus their current model 3
microtransaction bullshit scares me as a customer, I'm dreading the moment
other companies catch on with that. I'm specifically talking about the fact
that the base model 3 ships with heated seats out of the factory but you can
pay to have them unlocked with a software update. I suspect that having them
enabled with a simple software mod would get you accused of piracy since
you're using something you haven't paid a licence for(even though you've
obviously paid for the hardware)

~~~
kitsunesoba
Personally speaking I would not want to share a road with an autonomous car
that had been tinkered on by some random Joe. Autonomous farm vehicles or
something, sure, but public roads are way too risky. This is not the desktop
environment of your Linux laptop, it’s monstrously complex software
controlling thousands of pounds of metal and batteries.

~~~
gambiting
See, I don't agree at all. Just like all cars have to pass a pretty strict
annual inspection to be on the road, I imagine autonomous cars will have to go
through regular assessment too.

More specifically, I'm bothered by the fact that if you get into a crash in a
Tesla, Tesla can disable your car and stop it from activating unless you do
repairs at their approved dealership. You can't just buy parts from a
scrapyard and get it running again, Tesla is the gatekeeper and they don't let
anyone else hold the keys(they don't even release service manuals unless
absolutely required by law). In contrast I could buy a brand new Mercedes CLS
with its very respectable smart cruise control and Mercedes can't do anything
to stop me from replacing the engine, the head unit, or fixing the whole thing
if it's totalled - they just can't. It's not a freedom I'm willing to lose by
buying a Tesla.

~~~
mlindner
We don't have open source implantable medical devices either.

------
cmsonger
This focus on the hardware is silly. Assume for a second that their new
hardware is 50x faster than their last hardware.

That does not mean that their cars can self drive today.

That does not mean that their cars can self drive three years from now.

It's 100% not proven or obvious how car self driving skill and car self
driving error rates scale with compute -- but it's surely not linear.

~~~
DeonPenny
What if they proved it by improving hardware from self-driving hardware 1 to
2. If they proved that and proved it made their NN better then it makes sense.
Of course, it wouldn't to you cause you have no inside knowledge but it may
make perfect sense to them based on their data.

------
VikingCoder
Musk: "You're only going real fast in the forward direction."

Dozens of times in my life, I have been driving down the freeway at 70 MPH in
a 60 MPH zone, and I've noticed someone weaving through traffic behind me,
going closer to 140 MPH.

I need to know whether to change lanes, stay in my lane, stop changing lanes,
pump my breaks to indicate there is slowdown ahead of me that car might not
see, etc.

Just food for thought.

EDIT: I'd also like my vehicle to be good at avoiding a car that's about to
T-Bone me, at night, with no headlights on. I may not be very good at avoiding
that kind of accident today, but if LIDAR is necessary to protect me from that
kind of accident, then I might think it's a wonderful idea.

~~~
gpm
You're not responsible for dodging the person going 140 MPH behind you _to the
same extent_ as you are for dodging the tire doing 0mph in front of you.
Humans generally don't because they aren't capable of paying enough attention
to what is behind and in front of them simultaneously. The car - with 360
degree vision - is more capable in fact.

~~~
VikingCoder
Even if I'm not responsible, it's Defensive Driving. It can save my life to be
aware of the dangerous situations that other drivers are causing.

------
dougmwne
Those are some very bold claims. Level 5 by the end of this year? I find the
software approach intriguing and Karpathy's segment was enlightening and did a
lot to convince me of Tesla's advantages.

On the other hand, I've been sensing that Tesla is finding it harder and
harder to raise cash and has been getting increasingly desperate. Are we on
the cusp of a new transformative technology or the peak of the mother of all
bubbles? Time will tell.

~~~
hellllllllooo
Option 1: They have solved a problem so hard that no one else, even Waymo, is
claiming to be close even with $100k+ worth of sensors and a lot more compute
and they have also quietly solved multiple hard unsolved research problems.

Option 2: He's lying to get money.

------
Animats
Here's the new self-driving demo video from today.[1] From Tesla's HQ in Palo
Alto, out to I-280, down one exit, use interchange at Sand Hill to turn
around, come back. No visible conflicting traffic on non-freeway streets.

Compare the 2016 demo video.[2] That's a tougher route. That's the one where
we now know it took a lot of tries to get a clean video.

Waymo and Cruise have put up videos of their cars in city traffic. They get
criticized for things like getting stuck behind double-parked cars, and being
a bit shy of parked cars that project into a traffic lane. But they get where
they are going. Tesla is not showing anything near that level.

Supposedly the analysts at the meeting got to ride in a self-driving car.
Anyone seen reports from them?

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlThdr3O5Qo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlThdr3O5Qo)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAal0juXXzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAal0juXXzU)

~~~
DarmokJalad1701
[https://twitter.com/hamids/status/1120466861970399232](https://twitter.com/hamids/status/1120466861970399232)

These guys also went on the ride-along:
[https://youtu.be/2BZHXh1nbWc?t=360](https://youtu.be/2BZHXh1nbWc?t=360)

~~~
Animats
That's helpful.

Second video says the driver "touched the steering wheel once" in 15 minutes
of driving. That's a disconnect. So, one disconnect in, what, 10 miles of
driving? Waymo reported one disconnect per 1,392 miles to CA DMV last year.

Amusingly, the riders were not allowed to take video.

~~~
zaroth
Actually it's one per 11,017 miles! But be careful quoting the number. It is
not _all_ disengagements or all times the autopilot was turned off after being
turned on.

It is "deactivation of the autonomous mode when a failure of the autonomous
technology is detected or when the safe operation of the vehicle requires that
the autonomous vehicle test driver disengage the autonomous mode and take
immediate manual control of the vehicle."

------
Hamuko
Feels like they're just throwing a bunch of hardware specs at investors to
distract from any discussions about the current state of the software beyond
"just need to improve it now".

------
sharadov
You cannot access the stream from Tesla anymore, I found it here -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ)
Karpathy did a great job explaining this, I took Neural Networks a long time
back and his back to basics approach refreshed a lot of concepts I'd
forgotten!

~~~
personlurking
It's no longer in that link. I found it here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ)

~~~
wingworks
Is that the full stream though, it seems very perfectly set at 2 hours, like
it's the last 2 hours... idk, seems to jump in half way.

------
pepijndevos
Currently just showing some generic car footage. Apparently they will demo
their self-drivin features: [https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-self-driving-
autonomy-day-wh...](https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-self-driving-autonomy-day-
what-to-expect/)

~~~
tigershark
Yes, I was feeling dumb watching the same thing in a loop, hopefully they’ll
start soon with the real meat...

------
grey-area
“Anyone using Lidar is doomed”

Strong words from Musk about sticking with video only.

Later on in the software talk:

“Lidar is really a shortcut which sidesteps the fundamental problems...and
gives us a false sense of progress”

~~~
robterrell
I wonder if he's going to explain this position at all? Or if it's just
posturing against Waymo et al. Seems like more data is always better than less
data for this application?

~~~
DeonPenny
Because lidar is expensive, error-prone, and can't be created without flaws.
So if you make a car LIdar will fail way before camera. The only problem is if
camera only can work

~~~
sangnoir
Why not both? Infact, Waymo has Lidar, radar and cameras (Tesla have just the
last 2 and are working overtime to demonize the first). More data (and more
redundancy) is better - assuming you have the computing power to process all
the sensor input. As far as I can tell, the rubbishing of Lidar is FUD.

~~~
DeonPenny
Because if you're using lidar for depth and you try to mass produce the there
a high chance the lidar will be broken and because it accurate people will
assume it more correctly. Eyes and camera may sometime make mistake with
distance but usually it will be software not hardware. Lidar opens the issue
for both. So it's easier to use the camera and just try to make a camera as
good as lidar.

------
cromwellian
Seems to me that relying too much on Machine Learning for this is actually the
real risk, not LIDAR. Tesla's competitors are using ML, but combining it with
sensor fused data from LIDAR, Radar, accurate maps, and visual data. In other
words, they're starting from a view of the world with super-human sensing.

Starting from a purely visual domain likely dooms your system to making the
same types of mistakes that humans make visually in judgement. At least with
accurate maps and LIDAR as backup, you can sanity check output of your visual
processing against a map and LIDAR. If your claim is that the map might be out
of date, or the LIDAR too low rez, it still helps to err on the size of
caution.

In the worst case, the map tells you you can't go somewhere that you're
allowed to go. In the case where it says you are allowed to go somewhere were
you shouldn't, well your visual system should be telling you not to go there.
If it isn't, you're in a lot worse trouble than having a map with flaws.

Likewise, the claims that "LIDAR is expensive" is like claiming EVs are
expensive because "batteries are expensive!" If AVs become common, then
they'll be a huge demand for LIDAR and the costs will decline. LIDAR costs are
already declining. Maybe if Elon took some of Tesla's miracle engineers and
had them make a LIDAR, they could not only defeat Nvidia at chip making, but
defeat all LIDAR makers as well. (sarcasm) My guess is the real problem with
LIDAR is drag and vehicle trim/styling.

At this point, Tesla is basically stuck. They bet big early on a shitty sensor
suite before AV technology had been worked out, and wave their hands about how
using consumers as guinea pigs to feed them fleet data will magically fix
deficiencies in sensors. Well, what if this is a false hope and it doesn't? It
would mean they'd get sued by everyone who bought the AV suite as an option
and have to issue refunds or recalls to upgrade.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, you don't ship AV as an MVP on a
$100k vehicle and promise magic upgrades and fixes later before the technology
is even close. It's risking people's lives and it's already killed people.

~~~
andbberger
Indeed, Tesla is on the wrong side of history in sticking to their guns on
pure vision autonomy.

And they're going to kill people.

It's hard enough already to communicate to the public in any meaningful sense
ML results without #SKYNET brigading, Tesla is going to make it 100x harder
dragging us all through their mud.

I think at this point (of having been a matrix boi long enough) I am allowed
to publicly state my belief that we are very very very far away from human-
level visual perception. Just staggeringly, incomprehensibly far. We've just
barely started to be able to do the most basic things, sometimes.

Is it an incredible amount of collective dunning-kruger that is blinding
tesla? Or perhaps willful ignorance?

------
VikingCoder
Q: "What's the primary design objective of the next-gen chip?"

Mumbled Answer: "Safety."

...doesn't that mean the current-gen chip... isn't as safe as you want?

~~~
djtriptych
I don't see this line of reasoning. To me "safer than humans" or "in the 90th
percentile among drivers" is a fair go to market line.

Optimally safe should still be the goal. That is, no human could have provided
alternative input to the computer that would have created a safer outcome.

~~~
VikingCoder
I think you just agreed with me. Please reconsider what I've said and what
you've said.

------
breatheoften
Man -- his engineers must cringe quite a bit when he talks about a future
self-driving architecture built on DOJO with 'video-in, actuator controls out'
... just a tiny bit of speculation goes into saying something like that ... To
my mind, it undermines the presentation quite a bit which otherwise appears to
mainly argue that they will reach full self-driving by iterating on their
neural network sensor perception model.

~~~
wcoenen
Andrej Karpathy (who was one of the presenters today) actually made similar
statements last year, about how the part of the software stack that is not
neural networks is gradually shrinking:
[https://youtu.be/y57wwucbXR8?t=352](https://youtu.be/y57wwucbXR8?t=352)

------
tim333
Some video of demo rides from someone who was at the day:

Lane change on crowded freeway:
[https://twitter.com/hamids/status/1120472369762590722](https://twitter.com/hamids/status/1120472369762590722)
\- It manages it if not quite as smooth as a human.

Summon in parking lot:
[https://twitter.com/hamids/status/1120446405410205701](https://twitter.com/hamids/status/1120446405410205701)
likewise.

There's also an official Tesla sped up demo vid
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlThdr3O5Qo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlThdr3O5Qo)
\- hard to tell really.

Same video slowed with the display magnified and some Reddit discussion
[https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgb9or/fsd_dem...](https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgb9or/fsd_demo_slowed_down_with_blownup_augmented/)

------
fizzledbits
I think it’s a safe assumption that driver alertness positively correlates
with lives saved. But it’s hard to market this product with the sort of
rhetoric that would optimize for that, so they’ve found a few ways to console
themselves as they name the feature “autopilot” and endeavor to make the tech
appear magical.

If they think they’ve cleared the bar just by beating the crash statistics of
all cars, then they are still in the business of trading lives.

------
henvic
Here is the link to the recording:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE)

~~~
IOT_Apprentice
That video link shows as unavailable.

~~~
henvic
Yeah, I saw that but somehow I'm still watching it in another tab.

------
filleokus
What kind of event is this and who is it targeted to? Right now there’s a
comparison of energy consumption for different instructions on processors, I’m
very confused.

~~~
adanto6840
Surprisingly technical versus what I'd expected, but it is targeted
specifically at investors.

~~~
whitepoplar
The technical angle seems like a very smart one for this talk. You can just
smell the cowering insecurity of the analysts and their deference to Musk when
the technical descriptions whoosh past them. They may be (rightly) skeptical,
but they don't want to look stupid while being so.

------
andr
To summarize, it appears that their new chips can do 96x96 dot product in a
single cycle (multiplying neural network weights by values), and have hardware
for activations (ReLU, softmax, tanh) and pooling (as in convolutional neural
networks). This results in a crazy 144 trillions ops/second.

How does this compare to TPUs and the Neural Engine in iPhone CPUs?

~~~
LoSboccacc
something I don't understand, is this chip brand new? is it essential to the
autonomous drive?

~~~
DeonPenny
Chip is new and is needed for autonomous driving

------
jes
Is there a link to a replay of the live stream? The link on the Tesla IR site
just takes me to their main page.

~~~
stevep98
It was on Tesla's youtube channel up to about 2:30pm, then it just went
'unavailable' as I was watching it, and is now unavailable.

------
torpfactory
It's interesting to contrast Musk's stated aversion to LIDAR with his previous
statements about new technologies always starting at the high end and working
their way down [1]. Tesla appears to be trying to start at the low end (HW is
included with the purchase of a car even if you decide not to opt for the
software to make it function. You might imagine that you would start with all
the bells and whistles and pare them down as the technology matures and you
invent ways to do without.

[1][https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1075126514851602432](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1075126514851602432)

------
WheelsAtLarge
How can Musk make the prediction of a million autonomous taxis in less than
two years? That's just fantasy. There are just too many unknowns to solve. One
of the big ones is permission from the city governments. Once a car hits a
pedestrian or multiple taxies start having accidents, governments will bring
the project to a halt. Tesla might have a small test fleet somewhere but not 1
million taxis.

My guess is that Tesla will need another round of financing along the way and
they have to make sure that the stock's price stays up. Musk is a great
promoter but at some point he needs to come back to reality.

------
donmatito
I wonder if they are going to address potential limitations to their systems
(bad weather, snow etc). Their tech seems absolutely impressive but I suppose
there will always be failure. Does the system fail "gracefully" ?

------
tim333
New link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ)

(replay after the livestream ended)

------
ham_sandwich
It seems like Tesla is at a pivotal moment.

On one hand there are hyper-bulls who claim Tesla is a $4000 stock and the
future of transportation. On the other, hyper-bears claim the equity should
trade around $0-$10. There seems to be no middle ground.

It seems like they are almost betting the company on FSD. I don’t think FSD is
really even close to a possibility over the next 5-10yrs. I hope I’m wrong,
but if I’m right, I don’t see how Tesla keeps going on like this.

~~~
cmsonger
> It seems like they are almost betting the company on FSD.

IMO they don't have any choice. The more and longer they operate like a car
company shipping bigger and bigger volumes, the more their financials will be
undeniably trend towards those of the existing car companies and the more
their existing market valuation will be hard to justify.

They need something like this to not get traded at traditional car industry
multiples.

~~~
bryanlarsen
If you just measure based on Tesla's last two quarters, their P/E is just 28.
That's high for a car company but pretty low for tech. Self-driving is not
necessary to maintain that valuation, only continued growth of the electric
car market in general.

~~~
cmsonger
> That's high for a car company but pretty low for tech.

Yes! Totally agree.

> Self-driving is not necessary to maintain that valuation, only continued
> growth of the electric car market in general.

Disagree. The key properties of the car business are high capital costs and
high variable costs and not huge margins. The key property of the tech
business is low variable cost and often low capital costs (but not always) and
high margins.

There's nothing "tech" about building electric cars vs. normal cars and 10
years from now the margins and capital expenses of electric car business will
be like the existing ICE car business.

So this is Tesla saying: "Yeah, our financials are starting to look like a
normal car company, but we've got this thing that you should keep value us
even more like a tech company than you do today."

~~~
bryanlarsen
The market values Tesla like a car business that is growing ~50% per annum.

> 10 years from now the margins and capital expenses of electric car business
> will be like the existing ICE car business.

Tesla already has margins similar to existing car companies.

> So this is Tesla saying: "Yeah, our financials are starting to look like a
> normal car company, but we've got this thing that you should keep value us
> even more like a tech company than you do today."

Yes, they're saying that, but the market is obviously not buying it.

------
tdhttt
I have several questions about Karpathy's presentation: 1\. How to label
automatically using fleet learning? An example he gave is detecting cut-ins.
However, I am wondering if it could be applied to more general and basic
cases, for example, labeling lane marking/vehicles. 2\. How do you know if
someone is a good driver (which is essential for imitation learning)?

------
bg24
I read through all comments. Very informative.

How many people and companies are going to freak out if Elon and his team
deliver FSD without LIDAR? Say in 2022, not even 2020. My layman logic is that
AI is improving exponentially, and we do not know what artificial vision can
do in 2 years.

------
johnvega
This is the most exciting technology (software & hardware) and business event
in a long time.

------
rick22
They use the batch size as 1. That is surprising to me as all the online
course i see the batch size b/w 32 and 256.

------
nopriorarrests
Elon just promised Level 5 FSD this year, by the end of it.

~~~
rootusrootus
If by this year he means 2050, then I'd still be kinda surprised.

I just spent the weekend racking up several hundred miles in a brand new Model
P3D. Phenomenal performance, I am completely sold on the future of EV. I was
underwhelmed by autopilot however. Drives like a drunk. The adaptive cruise
control part actually made me motion sick. I had high hopes going in, so it
was a pretty big let down.

I suspect Tesla is going to find themselves on the other end of a class action
lawsuit over all the FSD upgrades they've been selling.

------
JoshTko
I wish someone will ask what gaps remain for full self driving? It seems like
Elon is saying that it just a data collection issue at this point.

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mellow-lake-day
Absolutely great talk! Especially impressive how big the fleet is and how well
they can use the data they have.

------
godelski
15 minutes in and it is still just showing stock footage. This thing was
supposed to start at 11am PST, right?

~~~
typo_hunter
11am Pacific Standard Tesla Time, the conversion to PST is iffy

~~~
godelski
Looks like it is ~+40 mins

------
paul_42
is anyone knowledgeable with how this compares to Waymo's solutions? I'm
curious.

~~~
jefft255
They are fundamentally different: to summarize, Waymo follows the HD maps
approach when you have a very precise map of a given city, with both metric
(actual 3D shape of the environment) and semantic (lanes, sidewalks, signs)
information, in which you localize yourself with centimeter-level accuracy
(with GPS, SLAM etc). When you're localized you can combine information that
you see now such as cars around you and high quality information coming from
the map.

Tesla, on the other hand, thinks this is too fragile to changing environments
and works with regular (think google maps level of detail, probably a little
better) maps, combined with local semantic information such as signs and lane
markings. This also means that they put less pressure on localization, because
they don't use the map to detect i.e. speed limit (I'm pretty sure Waymo can
detect those signs, it's just that the existence and position of the sign is
already known in a global world frame).

------
kapravel
link to the livestream video on youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE&t=4150s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE&t=4150s)

------
agumonkey
I wonder how commaai is taking the news. Fleet + imitation was their angle
too.

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sackroyd
Uber and Lyft are fucked.

~~~
joetribiani
How so?

~~~
gpm
If Tesla succeeds at FSD - Tesla is competing against them with hardware that
operates at (using the numbers from the presentation, if I recall them
correctly) ~1/10th the price.

They have contracts in place with the owners of cars they have sold preventing
them from letting Uber and Lyft use the self driving capability to compete.

~~~
DeonPenny
Not to mention they have the apple vs android advantage where since they build
their own hardware optimization is far easier than google partnering solution.

------
eastendguy
Ok, I am late to the show. Where can I watch the recording?

~~~
tim333
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ)

------
sahin-boydas
It is pretty techincal. Wow. Great. Thank you Tesla.

------
jak92
How much b-roll do they have?

~~~
sea-shore
Maybe it is a test to see when the AI generating the video breaks

------
kempbellt
Did that roadster just pass two model 3s on a double yellow blind turn?
Smh.... but that was awesome

------
microdrum
Stream just went offline. Anyone have a link?

~~~
microdrum
Here it is:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE)

------
schintan
doesn't portend well the way it is going, looks like they don't have anything
to show here.

------
secfirstmd
Musk: "Lidar is a fools errand"

Let's hope he is right.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
"It's like having two appendices. One appendix is bad"

~~~
dwighttk
I don't know the context for this, but one appendix isn't bad... appendicitis
is bad.

~~~
mynameisvlad
He means the appendices in a book.

~~~
dwighttk
I just watched the 5minute distillation and I’m pretty sure he was talking
about the organ.

