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Chris Lattner: “Turns out that Tesla isn't a good fit for me”
- Aron 9y agoI've had the impression it's pure chaos over at Tesla's autopilot division for quite a long time. They have so much to gain if they get the pieces right, but I'm not sure it's guaranteed to happen.
- emodendroket 9y agoSo does everyone else working on the same problem.
- gumby 9y ago> I've had the impression it's pure chaos over at Tesla's autopilot division for quite a long time. That's interesting. I've heard this too from people at three different self-driving car companies ("Tesla's autonomy group is melting down; we get a ton of resumes...blah blah"). But...it's from their competitors, and you're probably always getting resumes from folks at your competitors all the time (and your colleagues' resumes are heading in the other direction, perhaps yours too). So, though I'm no fan of Tesla, I have discounted such comments. Though perhaps I shouldn't have been?
- virgilp 9y agoThis seems apt: http://assets.amuniversal.com/f1ec72f02c380135c907005056a9545d http://assets.amuniversal.com/f1ec72f02c380135c907005056a954...
- 1024core 9y agoIt's not like Lattner was in ML or Autonomous Driving.
- haberman 9y agoI just saw their latest marketing literature on their website. They promise: > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot It seems somewhat irresponsible to promise that you have enough hardware to achieve something that nobody has ever achieved before, with any hardware. Tesla has plenty of impressive-looking videos on their website of autopilot working well, but if you Google for "Tesla autopilot fail" you can also find plenty of stuff like this, which is just surprisingly bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg Tesla strikes me as over-promising and under-delivering here. I wouldn't want to work in a division like that.
- andrewprock 9y agoBut what about the software?
- nostrademons 9y agoThey say "at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". This is a low bar to meet - some human drivers are really bad. I know I would much rather trust my life to one of the Google self-driving cars than some of the people I got in a car with in college, for example. It's also the wrong bar to meet, because lawmakers are going to be much tougher on AIs than on human constituents. It's not enough to be better than a human, you have to be so much better than a human that it'd be irresponsible not to mandate self-driving cars.
- resf 9y agoThe bar to meet will be precisely "as good as Waymo", because if Tesla's technology kills substantially more people, neither regulators nor consumers will allow it to exist.
- tedsanders 9y agoHuman drivers die at a rate of about 1 per 100 million miles driven. Waymo cars have only driven about 2 million miles, as I recall. Therefore, as it stands today, there is nowhere near enough public evidence to confidently believe that Waymo cars are less deadly than human drivers. Especially considering that much of that driving has taken place in meticulously mapped areas with good roads in daylight hours. Personally, I would trust a human driver over a Waymo car until strong statistical evidence shows that Waymo cars are safe in a wide range of conditions.
- skrause 9y agoI also don't think the bar should be "safer than a human driver", but "safer than than an experiended, sober, well-rested, defensive driver who doesn't use this phone while driving".
- zamalek 9y ago
- Jayakumark 9y agoThey just hired karpathy as director of autopilot division
- gkoberger 9y agoAndrej Karpathy, research scientist at OpenAI. https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-expert-andrej-karpathy-to-lead-autopilot-vision/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-...
- arcticbull 9y agoI'd recommend he join the Go team but, like, they seem pretty committed to their non-LLVM based compiler strategy.
- binarycrusader 9y agoI agree. Although, I would point out they recently accepted the Go LLVM port in a somewhat more recognized role: https://go.googlesource.com/gollvm/ https://go.googlesource.com/gollvm/ Unclear to me in what capacity it is "recognized" or "official" though.
- hoodoof 9y agoOK, I want you to program FizzBuzz on that whiteboard.
- tyingq 9y agoTruth is sometimes stranger than fiction. https://m.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our_test/ https://m.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our...
- valuearb 9y agoAs someone who spent over a decade writing in C, I read this as a subtle get-even move.
- xyzzyz 9y agoI wouldn't want people checking in code that doesn't conform to the coding practices of the rest of the project, even if the code came from Ken Thompson himself. If the coding practices are bad, his experience will hopefully allow him to convincingly argue this point. In any case, the company employs many other smart people too, and since the coding practices are there to facilitate collaboration, nobody should be above them.
- darren_ 9y agoI doubt this anecdote. There was no such test in 2011, and I haven't heard any tales from older timers about it either. It sounds like it's conflating some totally optional style-guide-conformance procedures you can do, with permission to check in code at all. And no-one gets to check in code without review regardless of how much expertise you've demonstrated.
- dpark 9y agoI'm not sure why you doubt the anecdote. It's a published quote in a published book by a respected author, and to my knowledge Thompson hasn't refuted the statement. The original quote doesn't have the trashy editorialization. Thompson simply had no need to go through the approval process so he didn't. https://books.google.com/books?id=2kMIqdfyT8kC&pg=PA474&lpg=PA474&ots=MlbvncLJAI&sig=PzQLg4KadXJ0aSxiTlfbvuw2Qdk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM96qFmc_UAhUQ_WMKHefIDrEQ6AEIITAC https://books.google.com/books?id=2kMIqdfyT8kC&pg=PA474&lpg=... When this was published, it was widely circulated and no one at the time stepped forward to claim it was untrue or that the requirement didn't exist. Given the fact that you make reference to "old timers" in this context, I doubt you were at Google in 2011 and are merely asserting your assumption as a fact.
- tyingq 9y agoI liked the tweet that suggested he should work on server side Swift. Doesn't sound like he's wanting to start a company though.
- mayoff 9y agoIBM has people working on server-side Swift, but (as I understand it) those people are mainly focused on ways to make the IBM cloud service more enticing.
- hoodoof 9y agoGetting a job is like getting into a nightclub. If you're a celebrity, the bouncers open the velvet rope and usher you straight into the club, leaving the long queue of punters waiting to be told that their shoes aren't right, or that its a private party.
- guessbest 9y agoI wish I was so successful I could publicly declare my failures without it affecting my all future job prospects.
- Inconel 9y agoI get what you're saying and agree it would be nice, but so long as we're wishing for stuff, I wish we could all, even those of us who are less successful, be able to declare our failures without it affecting our future job prospects. I'm entirely unremarkable, but looking back I would say most of my biggest personal and professional developments have been built upon some sort of failure or mistake.
- TheDong 9y agoYou are. No one cares if you declare "X company was not a good fit" or "I messed up on doing this". You clearly haven't because you, in error, think it'll nuke job prospects. It won't. They won't care. Trust me.
- Pica_soO 9y agoThe most important men in town will come to fawn on me They will ask me to advise them, Like a Solomon the Wise "If you please, Reb Tevye?" "Pardon me, Reb Tevye?" Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes Ya va voy, ya va voy voy vum And it won't make one bit of difference If I answer right or wrong When you're succesfull they think you really know.
- coldtea 9y ago>And it won't make one bit of difference If I answer right or wrong When you're succesfull they think you really know. Yeah, just not in the field Chris Lattner works in. This thread seems to have him confused for Kim Kardasian.
- Apocryphon 9y agoPerhaps it's time to try a non-hardware company.
- discordance 9y ago"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" - Alan Kay
- deepGem 9y agoI wonder what's the connection between Lattner and autopilot. When Tesla hired Lattner, my impression was that he would oversee the entire systems software architecture. Why they couldn't have retained Lattner and also hired Karpathy is beyond me.
- kensai 9y agoWell, Julia just got some financing. He should go there and help Julia's future interoperability with Swift.
- coldtea 9y agoI might be wrong, but I think Julia's financing is nowhere near enough to hire someone like Lattner.
- devit 9y agoWorking at Mozilla on the Rust compiler would be the best possible fit skills-wise (other than going back to LLVM).
- kibwen 9y agoThere does happen to be a research engineer position open at Mozilla right now, but it's for Servo, not Rust. To say nothing of the irony of having Chris Lattner working on Rust while Graydon Hoare works on Swift. :P But hey, Rust could undoubtedly benefit from a full-time LLVM engineer...
- edko 9y agoFrom one the presentations of this year's WWDC, I had the impression that there may be some of Rust's ownership concepts incorporated in future versions of Swift. It would definitely be very interesting.
- whazor 9y agoKotlin is being ported to LLVM, so maybe Google/JetBrains as well?
- skdotdan 9y agoIs this serious??? I don't get why he is leaving the company that soon, nor what it announces it on Twitter before getting a new job.
- coldtea 9y ago>I don't get why he is leaving the company that soon Because he doesn't like it there. >nor what it announces it on Twitter before getting a new job. Because it's his Twitter and he has nothing much to hide. It's not like he wont find employment (actually it might be not like he even needs employment that badly -- he could easily have a couple of million in the bank).
- bla2 9y ago> Because he doesn't like it there More likely the other way round.
- valuearb 9y agoYou really think they'd fire a showy public hire this fast? Unless he was committing felonies it's almost impossible. They'd be working with him to try to salvage the situation. Impetuous quitting over some specific issue he holds dear is only a thousand times more likely.
- suninwinter 9y agoI wish I had been this decisive the last time I joined a team that was a bad fit.
- JKCalhoun 9y agoI have no doubt Apple (and the Apple developer community at large) would love for you to come back.
- coldtea 9y agoWhat's strange to me is why he would think it was a good fit in the first place. His main work has been in languages, compilers and developer toolsets. Sure, Tesla makes use of those, and might even make a few of their own, but it's nowhere near their core interests. Google maybe?
- valuearb 9y agoChris has updated his resume http://nondot.org/sabre/Resume.html#workhistory http://nondot.org/sabre/Resume.html#workhistory "Tesla VP Autopilot Software January 30 - June 20, 2017 When I joined Tesla, it was in the midst of a hardware transition from "Hardware 1" Autopilot (based primarily on MobileEye for vision processing) to "Hardware 2", which uses an in-house designed TeslaVision stack. The team was facing many tough challenges given the nature of the transition. My primary contributions over these fast five months were: We evolved Autopilot for HW2 from its first early release (which had few features and was limited to 45mph on highways) to effectively parity with HW1, and surpassing it in some ways (e.g. silky smooth control). This required building and shipping numerous features for HW2, including: support for local roads, Parallel Autopark, High Speed Autosteer, Summon, Lane Departure Warning, Automatic Lane Change, Low Speed AEB, Full Speed Autosteer, Pedal Misapplication Mitigation, Auto High Beams, Side Collision Avoidance, Full Speed AEB, Perpendicular Parking, and 'silky smooth' performance. This was done by shipping a total of 7 major feature releases, as well as numerous minor releases to support factory, service, and other narrow markets. One of Tesla's huge advantages in the autonomous driving space is that it has tens of thousands of cars already on the road. We built infrastructure to take advantage of this, allowing the collection of image and video data from this fleet, as well as building big data infrastructure in the cloud to process and use it. I defined and drove the feature roadmap, drove the technical architecture for future features, and managed the implementation for the next exciting features to come. I advocated for and drove a major rewrite of the deep net architecture in the vision stack, leading to significantly better precision, recall, and inference performance. I ended up growing the Autopilot Software team by over 50%. I personally interviewed most of the accepted candidates. I made massive improvements to internal infrastructure and processes that I cannot go into detail about. I was closely involved with others in the broader Autopilot program, including future hardware support, legal, homologation, regulatory, marketing, etc." The original version apparently ended with the text "In the end, Elon and I agreed that he and I did not work well together and that I should leave, so I did."