5 ms·

Correction to article: "First Person to Hack iPhone Built Self-Driving Car"

148 points by jdkanani 11y ago

dutchbrit 11y ago
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.
- hamhamed 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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)
      - rsanders 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        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.
- johnz133 11y ago
  I also am rooting for the underdog. But the fact of the matter is, once a non-human component is found at fault for a fatal accident, it'll likely set the field back a few years. It's not about betting that he will fail, it's more about doubting that he can achieve the level of safety, by himself.
  - jzwinck 11y ago
    Given that in the US there is literally no level of safety which will satisfy even 90% of people, it's useful to have a bite-size entrant who can move fast and fail if needed.
- lucozade 11y ago
  I think they're more concerned that he might almost succeed. It wouldn't take many sensationalist headlines of crashes before a politician somewhere publicly "protects" their voters and the whole thing gets pushed back a decade. You can see it in miniature today. This whole hoverboard craze has blown up (sorry) because of some dodgy wiring in some models. But when it comes to banning things, no-one's looking at the labels.
damniatx 11y ago
I support geohots
jzwinck 11y ago
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.
rl3 11y ago
>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.
amatic 11y ago
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.
- gotchange 11y ago
  They came across in that statement as insecure and having self-esteem issues that they had to downplay or belittle the brilliant guy's work just to feel better about themselves or to dispel their investors fears of an imminent competition emerging to challenge their position in the market.
- codeulike 11y ago
  I have a feeling MobileEye wanted Tesla to release something like this.
  - frabcus 11y ago
    Right - the relationship with MobileEye, and motivation for in house staff, are really important.
- argonaut 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tonylemesmer 11y ago
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.")
caractacus 11y ago
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'.
Angostura 11y ago
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 11y ago
  "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.
revelation 11y ago
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.
dayaz36 11y ago
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
jsjohnst 11y ago
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.
m-i-l 11y ago
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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
AKifer 11y ago
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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
hanlec 11y ago
Who signs this post?
rootlocus 11y ago
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.
carbocation 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Source? AFAIK Vance's biography was authorized and they're on good terms.
cconcepts 11y ago
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-driving-car/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...
- ph0rque 11y ago
  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)?
untilHellbanned 11y ago
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.
Lordarminius 11y ago
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.

148 points by jdkanani 11y ago

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.

hamhamed 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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)
    - rsanders 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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.
johnz133 11y ago
I also am rooting for the underdog. But the fact of the matter is, once a non-human component is found at fault for a fatal accident, it'll likely set the field back a few years. It's not about betting that he will fail, it's more about doubting that he can achieve the level of safety, by himself.
- jzwinck 11y ago
  Given that in the US there is literally no level of safety which will satisfy even 90% of people, it's useful to have a bite-size entrant who can move fast and fail if needed.
lucozade 11y ago
I think they're more concerned that he might almost succeed. It wouldn't take many sensationalist headlines of crashes before a politician somewhere publicly "protects" their voters and the whole thing gets pushed back a decade. You can see it in miniature today. This whole hoverboard craze has blown up (sorry) because of some dodgy wiring in some models. But when it comes to banning things, no-one's looking at the labels.

damniatx 11y ago

I support geohots

jzwinck 11y ago

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.

rl3 11y ago

>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.

amatic 11y ago

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.

gotchange 11y ago
They came across in that statement as insecure and having self-esteem issues that they had to downplay or belittle the brilliant guy's work just to feel better about themselves or to dispel their investors fears of an imminent competition emerging to challenge their position in the market.
codeulike 11y ago
I have a feeling MobileEye wanted Tesla to release something like this.
- frabcus 11y ago
  Right - the relationship with MobileEye, and motivation for in house staff, are really important.
argonaut 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tonylemesmer 11y ago

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.")

caractacus 11y ago

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'.

Angostura 11y ago

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 11y ago
"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.

revelation 11y ago

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.

dayaz36 11y ago

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

jsjohnst 11y ago

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.

m-i-l 11y ago

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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

AKifer 11y ago

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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

hanlec 11y ago

Who signs this post?

rootlocus 11y ago

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.

carbocation 11y ago

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 11y ago
Source? AFAIK Vance's biography was authorized and they're on good terms.

cconcepts 11y ago

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-driving-car/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...

ph0rque 11y ago
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)?

untilHellbanned 11y ago

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.

Lordarminius 11y ago

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.