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Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy
- komaromy 9y agoInteresting, to move from an Elon-Musk-chaired non-profit to an Elon-Musk-owned for-profit.
- komaromy 9y agoAlso, this is very impressive for someone who finished his PhD less than two years ago.
- skadamat 9y agoI don't think he ever intended to stay at OpenAI long to be honest. He was a founding scientist of the nonprofit, so think he went there to do his time before he found an interesting opportunity (either in academia because he just finished his PhD or in industry)
- unityByFreedom 9y agoOpen AI was always a pipeline for Musk. Use other people's donations to attract and identify the talent, then move them under his payroll. I guess that's a win win for the employees and for Musk. Not sure how many other supporters Open AI has, though I doubt that's what they had in mind when they donated to support that effort.
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- jfoster 9y agoWorth noting that OpenAI may not otherwise exist. It mightn't be precisely ideal, but I think it's broadly a 3-way win.
- unityByFreedom 9y agoTheir mission, to add more open source tools to the ai space, is already being accomplished by for-profit companies like Google and Facebook. If it weren't attached to Musk, and if Tesla never hired from them, I'd agree it's good to have a non-profit in the mix. As it is, if it looks and acts like a pipeline for talent, it's a pipeline for talent.
- nsturis 9y agoIt's not like Musk doesn't donate to OpenAI himself..
- unityByFreedom 9y agoThat he spends money to find talent for his own company isn't so surprising. He's just done it in a new, slightly abstract way
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- sjg007 9y agoSo where does this leave openAi?
- tanilama 9y agoDoesn't OpenAI gets large part of their funding from Elon?
- letitgo12345 9y agoI mean OpenAI is not a competitor to Tesla.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoBut it very well might be a beneficiary of Tesla's Autopilot machine learning work. Mr Musk is not shy about sharing tech within his companies (Tesla adopted friction stir welding techniques pioneered at SpaceX [1]). Also, the patents Tesla offered to license to other automakers [2] to help accelerate the shift to electrified transportation. Now, granted, SpaceX does not file patents because their competition is primarily nation-states [3], but I feel thats a valid concern with regards to that domain. "We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China," said Musk in the interview. "If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book." [1] https://electrek.co/2015/05/24/spacex-transferred-novel-welding-techniques-and-equipment-to-tesla-motors/ https://electrek.co/2015/05/24/spacex-transferred-novel-weld... [2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you [3] http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-patents-2012-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-patents-2012-11
- samstave 9y agoFriction stir is really old... how did they pioneer it? Perhaps they perfected it?
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- timemachiner 9y agoSince it seems to be a thing to report that X person specializing in machine learning has moved from Y company to Z, it makes me wonder if other areas of computer science is seen as relevant by the general public. One rarely hears Dr. John Doe from Florida State University (or insert non-Standford university here) in Distributed systems has moved from Microsoft Research to NetApp. These are arbitrary names. The point is you rarely hear about people from other areas of CS outside of machine learning/universities outside of Stanford moving from one company to another. The field of CS is vast and there are multitude of practical and theoretical problems outside of machine learning that are worth looking into (ones that aren't currently considered hip or cool by the public).
- dejawu 9y agoI think it's fair and makes sense. A lot of Karpathy's work has been featured on HN and I find this news relevant in following what he's working on. When Scott Aaronson wrote about moving to Austin, that post made the rounds here too.
- sidlls 9y agoThis same thing is an issue in many scientific disciplines. How many people can even name an area of physics research that isn't particle physics or general relativity, for example?
- ccorda 9y agoSeems to be taking Chris Lattner's place: https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704 https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704
- jbuild 9y agoJust saw that too. https://electrek.co/2017/06/20/tesla-autopilot-chris-lattner-software-vision/ https://electrek.co/2017/06/20/tesla-autopilot-chris-lattner...
- pscsbs 9y agoWow! Tesla's official statement: "Chris just wasn’t the right fit for Tesla, and we’ve decided to make a change. We wish him the best." [0] Chris's response: "Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me after all. I'm interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader!" I don't think I've ever seen a tech company throw an employee under the bus so publicly. I wonder what Lattner did to warrant such a public separation? [0] https://electrek.co/2017/06/20/tesla-autopilot-chris-lattner-software-vision/ https://electrek.co/2017/06/20/tesla-autopilot-chris-lattner...
- fooker 9y agoBet Chris Lattner is heading to Google.
- adamnemecek 9y agoIf google were to embrace swift that would be spicy.
- fooker 9y agoAt this point, not really. The compiler is slow and buggy. (And to make the type system faster would take some interesting theoretical breakthroughs.)
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- nojvek 9y agoI follow Karpathy on Twitter and really enjoy his blog. I do fear that his impact in Tesla could be less than his impact at openai. Openai had some fundamentally great research and ideas. I wish him that best though. Hopefully some of Tesla algorithms will be open source someday and those of us who can't afford a Tesla will be able to use it as well.
- awqrre 9y agoTesla: "All Our Patent Are Belong To You"[0] 0:https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
- aerovistae 9y agoNot relevant. The software may not be patented but also just not published. You would have to reverse engineer it to get at the algorithms, and the car is surely heavily encrypted. It's like Musk said with SpaceX: publishing patents is just like putting out a recipe book for China.
- awqrre 9y agoit's also a recipe for future generations... or a backup if you will...
- Animats 9y agoBut not their "trade secrets". It's striking how little is publicly known about how each vendor's self-driving technology works. This is a technology that's grown up since the anti-patent "America Invents Act", and, as a result, there are few patents and much mystery. On rare occasions, someone gives a technical talk, but papers are seldom published.
- xyzzy4 9y agoIf A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.
- jfoster 9y agoDriving a car is currently specialised, as is folding laundry. The opportunity for autonomous vehicles is clear; you can start with replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income. (likely at somewhat less than 100% efficiency, but who cares because of the massive scale?) The next bit would be converting private trips into automated rides; replacing car ownership. The unit profits will decrease as part of this effort, but the opportunity is again huge. How will you monetise laundry folding automation? At best you can replace just some of the people at all the commercial laundries and turn that into profit, but many laundries may hire one person who does everything. For home use you could sell a machine, but how much would you need to charge for it for that to equal recurring revenue from autonomous vehicles and how much are people willing to pay for a laundry robot? (even robotic vacuums are still quite niche despite probably being more convenient and costing less than LaundryBot)
- zghst 9y agoLaundry bot would make no money, I think. People are happy to do this task on their own or via a maid.
- bpicolo 9y agoLaundry bot would definitely make money, tons of it. Robo maid is like numero uno on things people have historically wished robots would do in the future
- veidr 9y agoYep, I paid around $2000 for a nice Hitachi drum-type washer-dryer machine last year. I would certainly, without any hesitation whatsoever, have been willing to pay $5000 or even a bit more for one that, instead of just washing and drying all our clothes, took a pile of dirty clothes as input and output a few stacks of washed, dried, folded, and sorted clothes. Anybody with children would want this; those who also have sufficient money would buy it.
- cityhall 9y agoAnyone have any insight into what the top ML people are being paid right now?
- pscsbs 9y agoThe equity packages tend to be in the tens of millions for a 4-year vest. Source: I am a manager who has given offers to top-tier ML experts.
- soldierofhayley 9y agoNo idea how you are getting downvotes, this is accurate.
- senatorobama 9y agoI feel so small.
- bostonvaulter2 9y agoYes, but what is the salary. Tens of millions of stock could end up being worth $0.
- pgodzin 9y agoAt early stage startups, not at public companies like Tesla
- bostonvaulter2 9y agoAh, good point.
- zghst 9y agoIf I fail at startup life, this is an obvious next step in my career.
- ralfd 9y ago
- du_bing 9y agoWonderful news!
- terrble 9y agoKarpathy. Car pathy. * I hate myself for this.
- mikeash 9y agoYou may enjoy (or hate) Wikipedia's article on aptronyms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym
- manishmarahatta 9y agoso it's done for other car industries :/
- foobarqux 9y agoI think he'll regret accepting the position. Impossible deadlines are going to force him out in under 12 months.
- kilroy123 9y agoAs much as I want to see Tesla and Elon Musk succeed, I wouldn't work for one of this companies. So I agree.
- victor9000 9y agoLikewise. As notorious as Amazon became for it's negative work/life balance, it seems like every Musk-run company is at least twice as bad. People regularly throw out 80hr/week numbers when discussing life at SpaceX. Thanks, but no thanks.
- colmvp 9y agoThis is great to hear. Andrej has contributed a lot to DL students worldwide, what with his lectures online and his writeups, that I'm glad he's continuing his upward trajectory. A very inspiring person.
- throw2bit 9y agoWhat is so hackerynews about this ? Hackernews is turning facebooky with low quality content.
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- Animats 9y agoWhat this really reflects is that Tesla has painted itself into a corner. They've shipped vehicles with a weak sensor suite that's claimed to be sufficient to support self-driving, leaving the software for later. Tesla, unlike everybody else who's serious, doesn't have a LIDAR. Now, it's "later", their software demos are about where Google was in 2010, and Tesla has a big problem. This is a really hard problem to do with cameras alone. Deep learning is useful, but it's not magic, and it's not strong AI. No wonder their head of automatic driving quit. Karpathy may bail in a few months, once he realizes he's joined a death march. If anything, Tesla should have learned by now that you don't want to need to recognize objects to avoid them. The Mobileye system works that way, being very focused on identifying moving cars, pedestrians, and bicycles. It's led to at least four high speed crashes with stationary objects it didn't identify as obstacles. This is pathetic. We had avoidance of big stationary objects working in the DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005. With a good LIDAR, you get a point cloud. This tells you where there's something. Maybe you can identify some of the "somethings", but if there's an unidentified object out there, you know it's there. The planner can plot a course that stays on the road surface and doesn't hit anything. Object recognition is mostly for identifying other road users and trying to predict their behavior. Compare Chris Urmson's talk and videos at SXSW 2016 [1] with Tesla's demo videos from last month.[2] Notice how aware the Google/Waymo vehicle is of what other road users are doing, and how it has a comprehensive overview of the situation. See Urmson show how it handled encountering unusual situations such as someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom. Note Urmson's detailed analysis of how a Google car scraped the side of a bus at 2MPH while maneuvering around sandbags placed in the parking lane. Now watch Tesla's sped-up video, slowed down to normal speed. (1/4 speed is about right for viewing.) Tesla wouldn't even detect small sandbags; they don't even see traffic cones. Note how few roadside objects they mark. If it's outside the lines, they just don't care. There's not enough info to take evasive action in an emergency. Or even avoid a pothole. Prediction: 2020 will be the year the big players have self-driving. It will use LIDAR, cameras, and radars. Continental will have a good low-cost LIDAR using the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts at an affordable price point. Tesla will try to ship a self-driving system before that while trying to avoid financial responsibility for crashes. People will die because of this. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik [2] https://player.vimeo.com/video/192179727 https://player.vimeo.com/video/192179727
- nodesocket 9y agoAndrej paired with chip guru Jim Keller [1] (vice president of autopilot hardware engineering) should be an amazing combo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)
- wideem 9y agoHaven't thought that Andrej is such a big star in tech and deep learning communities. Which him all the best, his deep learning course was amazing
- smithsmith 9y agoHow old is Andrej Karpathy ? Unable to find on google.