
Correction to article: "First Person to Hack iPhone Built Self-Driving Car" - jdkanani
https://www.teslamotors.com/support/correction-article-first-person-hack-iphone-built-self-driving-car
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rootlocus
Both articles were written for a wide audience, which includes non technical
people. Tesla's image and technology were bashed by someone claiming to know
everything there is to know in the field. Non technical people see 'a limited
demo on a known stretch of road' and assume Tesla engineers are idiots who
wasted two years when they could have employed this awesome dude to think
outside the box (that's always cool) and magically implement machine learning
to solve all the problems.

'Learning by doing' as presented by Hotz is all fine and dandy when you drive
on a motorway with a very limited set of road signs, no pedestrians, no
traffic lights, etc. Hotz also assumes people learn to drive by watching
others, which is only partially correct. Traffic rules are not learned from
experience. Low light conditions, fog, handling the car on snow and wet
surfaces and numerous other factors have to be trained (if they can be taught
through training). And after all that work, the algorithm must be tested
extensively before it can be shipped into production. The reporter omits
asking any questions regarding these aspects.

I don't see the problem with Tesla highlighting these aspects to people who
may be fooled into thinking one boy genius would solve all the problems with
self driving cars in a couple of years, while they (Tesla) are wasting time.

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m-i-l
Seems a reasonable response to me. After reading the original article I was
left with the impression that Tesla had outsourced the development of their
autonomous driving technology, and this changes that impression.

And I have to agree that getting such a complex and safety critical system
production ready is beyond the reach of a single individual, no matter how
talented they are. Its like a single individual might be able to build a
rocket which can reach the edge of space, but not extend it to take human
passengers into orbit (and back again safely).

And I'm not sure Tesla should be publicly congratulating him. While I do think
it is very impressive what he has done, there is an element of reckless
endangerment if he is indeed testing this on busy public roads after only a
few hours of development.

If I were George, I would I'd use this project to either (i) get a job at one
of the companies with significant resources so I could take the work further
(but his short stints at a number of technology companies suggests he doesn't
work well for others), or (ii) get funding so I could build a much bigger team
to take the project further.

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amatic
They seem sort of defensive and needy. "Oh, the didn't _reaaally_ make a
better car then we did, we had that two years ago, and ours is so much better
and ... ". Of course it is, the guy made it in his garage.

The classy thing to do would be congratulating the guy and encouraging even
more open experimentation. I mean, they already are open-sourcing a lot of
their work.

This statement doesn't seem in line with that.

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argonaut
On the contrary, I thought Hotz came off in the original article as a bit too
arrogant when he basically bashed Tesla's autopilot in order to sell the
reporter on his own project.

EDIT: For what it's worth, this may have been the angle the reporter wanted:
reporters are very good at stroking your ego and getting you to tell them
things you shouldn't be telling them. Nonetheless, revealing email
correspondence about private business/job dealings is not very classy, whether
or not you're a big company.

~~~
arethuza
I think if you are a person working in a garage you can get away with bashing
products from multi-zillion dollar companies.

A multi-zillion dollar company criticizing someone working in a garage, as
amatic notes, is the opposite of classy.

~~~
rootlocus
Where's the criticism? They merely pointed out (to non technical people)
there's a long way to go to reach 99.9999% precision. They said nothing bad
about Hotz achievement (except that it's relatively easy to achieve). They
also corrected a mistake in the article regarding developing the autopilot in-
house.

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scotty79
"you got nothing" is kind of empty criticism

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tonylemesmer
Would you buy a system like that from a guy? I wouldn't and I'd feel
uncomfortable, just like I am around poor drivers, if I knowingly encountered
one on the roads.

Its a neat project and a serious amount of effort, well done. But come on, as
others have said - a setback to the entire industry would be the outcome if he
had a crash - doubly so, since he's publicly stated he intends to use the same
Israeli component that everyone else uses. Tesla should try and distance
themselves from this type of enterprise. The way it is portrayed in the
article geohot seems to have a slightly flippant approach. Not sure if that's
fair to him or not. ("Dude the first time it worked was this morning", "Don't
touch that or we die.")

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jzwinck
This piece is really well written in an accessible style. It's even more clear
than the original article, and does a great job of sounding genuinely kind to
all parties (except maybe the journalist, who will be prepared for it).

Well done, Tesla. Well done for making awesome cars, responding nearly
instantly to something you barely needed to bother with, and not letting your
legal team rewrite everything you say into oblivion.

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dutchbrit
I applaud George Hotz, will be cool to see what the end product will be like.
Tesla seems pretty sure of themselves that he will fail, but I hope he'll
prove them wrong.

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hamhamed
This is more of a getting the facts straight than Hotz is gonna fail article.
It's more like if Hotz is not gonna scale and stay by himself, he won't be
able to compete.

Though I don't think that is the case, after yesterday's viral article, I'm
sure as shit Hotz is going to raise VC fund and get a team going.

~~~
bottled_poe
Hotz is a talented hacker. Tesla isn't into hacking. As pointed out in another
thread, Tesla has engineering processes in place to finish off that pesky
final 20% that seems to drag on forever... I am certain that Geohotz will get
sick of this project and move on to something new once the hacking part is
over and the hard part begins.

~~~
hamhamed
I'm a hacker too, so I can relate a lot. Hotz isn't the kind of person to
start something and not finish it, esp after all this press..there's pressure
now, I can def see the entrepreneurial side in him.

In the interview he said it himself, "I'm going to be the next billion dollar
CEO". He finally built something that can be VC fundable and is legal enough
to have ppl backing him.

But..you could be right too..it might just be a dead project soon (though I
doubt it)

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rsanders
I think the series of < 6 month stints at various jobs indicates he's
comfortable changing direction early if he's not happy with the situation. But
it does seem likely that press like this will provide access to funding that a
skilled operator could turn into a mature product.

~~~
hamhamed
Jobs are jobs. They come and go.

Startups though..he is vowing he'll build something smarter than
Mobileye..seems pretty likely he's going to stay for at least another year in
this and more if it's not failing.

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caractacus
I am more surprised that Tesla did not make a point of saying 'Elon Musk did
not encourage George Hotz to play fast and loose on San Francisco highways to
win a bet' and 'there is no formal financial relationship between Tesla and
geohot'.

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carbocation
In addition to the substantive points raised by other commenters, the context
is notable. The Geohot story was written by Ashley Vance, author of an
unauthorized Elon Musk biography and with whom Musk and Tesla have had prior
disagreements. That may influence the degree to which a rebuttal may be felt
necessary, and the tone chosen for the rebuttal.

~~~
arcticfox
Source? AFAIK Vance's biography was authorized and they're on good terms.

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rl3
> _We should also clarify that Tesla’s autopilot system was designed and
> developed in-house._

I thought it was quite odd the article was claiming otherwise. Remarketing an
off-the-shelf solution for a feature that complex didn't seem like Tesla.

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cconcepts
I just read the associated article [1] and somehow, despite the fact that I've
understood that neural networks and deep learning have been coming for years,
it has caused some kind of explosion in my brain - like this is all coming
true quicker than I thought. What struck me in particular was the notion that
physical work has been revolutionised and now thought-based work will be
revolutionised - removing from large chunks of humanity that must fundamental
of needs - something to frantically do all day.

Can anyone recommend online courses in deep learning, neural networks and
machine vision? I have kids that I need to prepare for a world that I just
realised I hardly understand.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-
driv...](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/)

~~~
ph0rque
I had similar thoughts after reading the associated article: is there a series
of MOOCs one can take to learn what Hotz learned (or at least a fraction of
it)?

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Angostura
An unusually poor PR mis-step from Tesla with an ill-judged tone. It is
equally possible to make exactly the same points by congratulating the lone
hacker for what he has managed to achieve by himself and then lead the reader
through the extraordinary areas of innovation that Tesla has achieved in
housed and the challenges that Hotz may yet find himself facing.

~~~
gtirloni
"Congratulations to him, he is right, anyone can create what we've done. But
let us show you, reader that has already stopped reading, how he is wrong."

Doesn't seem like good PR.

If you're talking about a technical article intended for engineers interested
in the field, maybe your take could work. This, however, is for the broad
population and the original article painted Tesla engineers as nothing more
than people wasting millions of dollars while a single guy in a garage can do
the same. Not only the tone was disrespectful to all the work they've been
doing, but it is also of concern to sales people that now have to explain why
Tesla charges so much for something so easy to replicate.

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revelation
I'm usually supportive of Tesla in their righteous crusade, but even they have
to realize that they can't be using MobilEye forever, right?

It's a stopgap solution to get a basic system up (and that's what the
Autopilot is, this kind of functionality was in cars years ago), but if they
want to move into fully autonomous driving, they will need their own vision
solution.

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dayaz36
It's so obvious MobileEye asked them to right this. The original article had
Elon quoted saying that he would give him a multi million dollar bonus once
they drop MobileEye. Unless that quote was falsely attributed to Elon I'm
pretty sure the original article was correct and MobileEye was bummed.
[https://i.imgur.com/4gdCzKj.png](https://i.imgur.com/4gdCzKj.png)

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jsjohnst
It's a terribly sourced article, so I personally don't blame them for
responding in the way they did. He's an extremely gifted developer, but from
the title down (he wasn't the first one to "hack" the iPhone) it's factually
wrong on many levels. This reeks of a reporter who's either a fan boy or has
an axe to grind with Tesla.

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untilHellbanned
Why respond? You really think Google [or self-respecting company] would
dignify some random person one-upping their self-driving initiative with an
official blog post? Seriously? Elon Musk's hair-transplant-insecurity is a
strong one.

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AKifer
Anything can be said and PRed, the only thing that matters is results, and
only a real world contest will prove who's who. But I'm still wondering about
the objectivity of the original article, does 2k locs written by geohot really
beats the systems existing today? Or is that kind of a high level code in top
of something else not mentioned in the article, I'd rather think of that
second possibility.

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Lordarminius
What gets me puzzled about this article is an angle pointed out by a
journalist (I forget whom now): how on earth do you rationalize "correcting"
an article written by someone else? It is unusual and borderline impolite.

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hanlec
Who signs this post?

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damniatx
I support geohots

