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Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

360 points by kiddz 7y ago

pepijndevos 7y ago
Currently just showing some generic car footage. Apparently they will demo their self-drivin features: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-self-driving-autonomy-day-what-to-expect/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-self-driving-autonomy-day-wh...
- tigershark 7y ago
  Yes, I was feeling dumb watching the same thing in a loop, hopefully they’ll start soon with the real meat...
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godelski 7y ago
15 minutes in and it is still just showing stock footage. This thing was supposed to start at 11am PST, right?
- typo_hunter 7y ago
  11am Pacific Standard Tesla Time, the conversion to PST is iffy
  - godelski 7y ago
    Looks like it is ~+40 mins
- Animats 7y ago
  The Verge says "The event was slated to start at 2PM ET (but is running a little late)". Still showing car commercial type clips.
- martythemaniak 7y ago
  I feel Tesla livestreams are very much like their cars - they never launch on time, but when they eventually do, they're pretty good and worth the wait.
jak92 7y ago
How much b-roll do they have?
- sea-shore 7y ago
  Maybe it is a test to see when the AI generating the video breaks
- deleted 7y ago
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netinstructions 7y ago
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
- tigershark 7y ago
  Maybe too much confident if you ask me..
  - netinstructions 7y ago
    I agree. The interview with MIT researcher Lex Fridman was difficult to watch because it didn't seem like they were on the same page at all - Lex asking thoughtful and pointed questions and Elon dismissing them as if the questions themselves are moot because self driving is right around the corner. It was mind boggling. I am hoping Tesla can provide some specifics today because it seems Elon is living in a fantasy world (albeit one I'd like to live in if we can actually get safe self-driving cars).
    - LoSboccacc 7y ago
      I'm gonna say Elon is being extremely bold selling a technology that's current leader in deaths behind the autonomous wheels. also I can't reconcile how the new hardware is this huge leap ahead beyond raw computing power if, by Tesla own claims, previous hardware was perfectly capable of autonomous driving. seems people were getting fooled either now or before.
- dforrestwilson 7y ago
  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=2ahUKEwiR7KHlq-ThAhUPHzQIHYU2DqEQzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibtimes.com%2Felon-musks-tesla-surprisingly-fails-lead-autonomous-driving-technology-2786913&psig=AOvVaw1gWIsj1jFDhjHpGWy2DVii&ust=1556044547357367 https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR... 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-strategy-is-outdated-and-possibly-dangerous/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-str...
kempbellt 7y ago
Did that roadster just pass two model 3s on a double yellow blind turn? Smh.... but that was awesome
- deleted 7y ago
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iandanforth 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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)
  - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    > 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. If you think this is a new thing, you haven't followed the car industry much. Just as an example, my 2002 el cheapo Peugot was bought without the option to show instantaneous MPG/average MPG/range/etc. Spend two hours soldering/gluing on the missing $2 toggle switch, ask a friend with the Peugeot Planet update tool to enable it in software, and Bob's your auntie. It goes much further than that though, especially when you get into chip tuning. Software upgrades that add 50 horsepower to your engine output are commonplace. But as for the "actively hostile to 3rd party repairs/mods", this part scares me to.
    - gambiting 7y ago
      I can sort of understand the software differentiation - I have no issue with Windows Home and Pro editions having different price points even thought the code on the disc is identical for instance(maybe that's hypocritical of me?). But I do have an issue with paying for hardware(heated seats in this case) and that hardware being disabled until a payment is made. I don't know, it just feels different.
filleokus 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Surprisingly technical versus what I'd expected, but it is targeted specifically at investors.
  - whitepoplar 7y ago
    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.
2bitencryption 7y ago
...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.
- mattrp 7y ago
  If you’ve listened to their earnings calls this is par for the course. Say what you will about his tweets, but I find these discussions fantastically informative and transparent.
  - isoprophlex 7y ago
    absolutely glorious, they're taking questions. first question: can you use anything else besides ReLU activations in your neural net engine? this is wonderful
    - akhilcacharya 7y ago
      ...is it? I don't know the context here but it feels like they're trying to ML-splain Karpathy?
    - 2bitencryption 7y ago
      what a funny question. "you say you can put bananas in your smoothie. just a thought, but perhaps, might I ask, do you have the capability to put strawberries as well, or are we not there yet?"
      - pixelpp 7y ago
        haha
      - chrisa 7y ago
        That was my first instinct to that question as well, but I think he was just asking if ReLU was required by the hardware design - or if it was possible to use other activation functions as well. If the the ReLU was part of the hardware itself somehow, then it wouldn't be possible to use tanh or sigmoid (which may be better in certain situations); so I think he was just asking if ReLU was required, or if there was flexibility allowed in the activation function.
schintan 7y ago
doesn't portend well the way it is going, looks like they don't have anything to show here.
ham_sandwich 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      > 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."
cmsonger 7y ago
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.
- mattrp 7y ago
  I’m wondering what new spinoff comes from the hardware... does it have benefits / application to anything in addition to AD?
- Ardon 7y ago
  There's another one of these coming about the software specifically.
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  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.
Animats 7y ago
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.
- Animats 7y ago
  Musk says there will be a driving demo later today. Up next, the neural nets person.
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    how did the demo go? Is there separate video?
- est31 7y ago
  > "All we need to do is improve the software" - Musk [12:07 PDT] That's an old claim, see this 2016 press release [1]: > as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. At this point I believe the claim once I see the self-driving functionality having been rolled out to the public and the accident number been reduced. [1]: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
- isoprophlex 7y ago
  "LIDAR is a fool's errand. Everyone relying on LIDAR is doomed." edit: beat me to it
  - vasilipupkin 7y ago
    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
sahin-boydas 7y ago
It is pretty techincal. Wow. Great. Thank you Tesla.
jacquesm 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      If anything it'd be detrimental since it would allow more people to drive longer and more often.
- deleted 7y ago
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secfirstmd 7y ago
Musk: "Lidar is a fools errand" Let's hope he is right.
- swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
  "It's like having two appendices. One appendix is bad"
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    I don't know the context for this, but one appendix isn't bad... appendicitis is bad.
    - mynameisvlad 7y ago
      He means the appendices in a book.
      - dwighttk 7y ago
        I just watched the 5minute distillation and I’m pretty sure he was talking about the organ.
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grey-area 7y ago
“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 7y ago
  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?
  - Hamuko 7y ago
    >I wonder if he's going to explain this position at all? Doubt it.
  - DeonPenny 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
andr 7y ago
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 7y ago
  something I don't understand, is this chip brand new? is it essential to the autonomous drive?
  - DeonPenny 7y ago
    Chip is new and is needed for autonomous driving
- Traster 7y ago
  Can they actually do a 96x96 dot product in a single cycle? My understanding was that they can do 1 96x96 dot product per cycle - that is to say that their throughput is a 96x96 dot product but it'll be heavily pipelined.
VikingCoder 7y ago
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?
- ryanlol 7y ago
  Are any cars ever as safe as you want?
  - VikingCoder 7y ago
    Society has decided how to judge whether I am safe to drive, and I have passed the tests. I worry that the laws on the books are insufficient to judge whether a computer is safe to drive. If Tesla already has plans to increase safety, I'd like to know how they judge it, where they think they are, where they'd like to improve, etc. As a voter.
    - stevep98 7y ago
      I think there is a lot of scope for an autonomous vehicle to be safer than a human driver. Consider: 1) computer has faster reaction times. 2) 360-degree awareness 3) better awareness of vehicle performance. Imagine a scenario where you are at speed and get a tire blowout. The car can sense it instantly through tire pressure sensor, and counter the swerve appropriately - something that humans are very poorly prepared or practiced for. Alternatively, a driver in a neighboring lane makes an unsafe lane change into your lane. The car sees him, honks the horn, moves/brakes/accelerates to avoid the other car, before you've even seen whats happening.
- djtriptych 7y ago
  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.
  - 7y ago
paul_42 7y ago
is anyone knowledgeable with how this compares to Waymo's solutions? I'm curious.
- jefft255 7y ago
  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).
Hamuko 7y ago
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".
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iandanforth 7y ago
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 7y ago
  It was pointed out that All data is anonymized.
  - iandanforth 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
  - salawat 7y ago
    Bull. You can't say "You can query for anything!" and have it be anonymized. In fact, if you're taking a camera shot, that's the most broadband sensor imaginable, and no thanks, I don't trust any company with profit motive not to crumble and pop out a software update to selectively disable picture blurrers, or to not have a Boolean flag in your data scrubber. As a company, making that statement is just trying to slip one past and hope nobody asks inconvenient questions about it.
    - deleted 7y ago
fossuser 7y ago
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.
- grey-area 7y ago
  This software talk is fascinating and a great introduction to neural nets.
- dwighttk 7y ago
  "many times better than competitors" "next gen that will be 3x better to ship in a couple years" applying psudomathematical varnish to marketing-speak
  - fossuser 7y ago
    I was summarizing - they gave explicit technical details in the talk.
    - dwighttk 7y ago
      Nvidia says they were comparing against an inferior chip https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccurate-in-self-driving-comparison-2019-04-22 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccura...
  - DeonPenny 7y ago
    The talk was extremely technical
- sytelus 7y ago
  > 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?
sackroyd 7y ago
Uber and Lyft are fucked.
- joetribiani 7y ago
  How so?
  - gpm 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
donmatito 7y ago
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" ?
mellow-lake-day 7y ago
Absolutely great talk! Especially impressive how big the fleet is and how well they can use the data they have.
sairahul82 7y ago
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.
- slg 7y ago
  >Karpathy's presentation is really good. Watch it later if you get some time. I would second this recommendation. He did a really good job not only explaining Tesla's approach, but also breaking down the concepts in an easy to understand way for laypeople. That is a rare skill to have especially among someone who is obviously so technically accomplished.
  - chibg10 7y ago
    Based on what I know about how high-level executive meetings and presentations (which is the role Karpathy is playing here) go, there's a pretty good chance the presentation was not actually developed by Karpathy but a Tesla team of significant size.
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  It was great including his explanation of how Tesla drives in snow and rain which is hard to understand how a car can do it.
- tjoff 7y ago
  Does anyone doing lidar not also do visual recognition?
VikingCoder 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- sixQuarks 7y ago
  I’ve been driving for nearly 30 years and have never even seen one person going 140mph, yet alone dozens
  - 1123581321 7y ago
    The person who wrote that doesn’t realize how fast 140 would seem. That kind of speed differential is not something you can attempt to avoid. Even 100 vs. 70 is rare, and the safest thing to do given that differential is nothing. This is not an area any car company should worry about.
Traster 7y ago
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.
- tomComb 7y ago
  I'm a fan of Tesla, but not Musk. You really can't believe much that comes out of his mouth. If you look at his past claims it becomes clear that he should just be ignored.
  - willio58 7y ago
    Being the fan of a company while completely ignoring the ceo of said company is questionable to me.
    - tomComb 7y ago
      Tesla has great products, created and supported by thousands of people who appear to go above and beyond. Kudos to them. And kudos to Musk for the vision and the early execution, but that doesn't mean I have to like him or believe that he is the right person for this phase of the companies growth.
  - davej 7y ago
    > If you look at his past claims it becomes clear that he should just be ignored. What's an example of this? His timelines are often much too aggressive for reality but he repeatedly delivers (eventually).
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JoshTko 7y ago
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.
nopriorarrests 7y ago
Elon just promised Level 5 FSD this year, by the end of it.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  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.
breatheoften 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  Nope his engineers have talked about this long before he did. More than likely they convinced him not the other way around.
grecy 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sharadov 7y ago
  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.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    If the current state of autopilot is even tangentially related to their progress on full self-driving, then it's a lot more than a few years away.
    - danhak 7y ago
      How recent is your experience? I’ve owned a Model 3 for over a year and the pace at which autopilot has been improving is staggering.
      - rootusrootus 7y ago
        I did a road trip this weekend and used autopilot for more than 400 miles on a brand new P3D (with the FSD option, limited though it is right now). Mostly freeway, some rural roads. Here are my observations, I assume it's pretty typical but obviously all I have is anecdata. Lane following works effectively, but it wanders a bit. Mostly not enough to be bothersome, though sometimes it will hug one side or the other close enough to make me think about the big truck next to me. Sometimes a little late reacting to a curve, though not to the point of going across the line. Planned lane changes work pretty nicely. Identification of vehicles around the car is good towards the front and noticeably spotty to the rear quadrants. It reliably misidentifies the merging traffic lane as one big lane as soon as the line ends, and promptly drives to the right to straddle the 'middle' and then corrects as the line converges to the normal width. Adaptive cruise control is flat out disappointing. Granted, I've never driven anyone else's automation, but it actually made me motion sick at times. I thought it did a really admirable job of handling people merging right in front of the nose of my car without jamming the brakes. Just smoothly slipped back until the right following distance was achieved. But in open traffic, when I came up on another car, it would abruptly slow down a bit too aggressively, and then fiddle with the speed a bit until it matched the leading car. If the lead car switched lanes, it waited until several seconds after the car was in the next lane and then abruptly sped up to the programmed max speed. There were times I could tell how frustrating this style was to people behind us who were not using a similar system. Twice it braked suddenly, though not any kind of panic stop, and then immediately sped back up. Like it saw something concerning and then changed it's mind a split second later. Made my wife a little nervous after the second time, but it didn't happen again the rest of our trip. Overall I'd classify it as a moderately drunk driver :). I let it drive us into a couple moderately uncomfortable merge situations just to see how it would deal with traffic entering the freeway, and while it didn't get us in a wreck or anything, it didn't make me feel like AP is on the verge of becoming viable FSD. For what it's worth, this was on I-5 in between Portland and Seattle, in mostly light traffic. We have what are, in my experience, pretty easy relaxed freeway configurations. Long ramps, no ramp lights, etc. I borrowed the P3D so I could have myself an extended test drive to decide if I really wanted a Model 3 or not. Wicked fast (which is still an understatement), I love the power but would probably choose to steer it myself for the forseable future. I wish they'd put in nicer seats (like, my legs were getting numb at one point!), just standard Recaros like everyone else would be perfectly nice. I think I've decided that I really like it but I'm going to wait for Model Y before pulling the trigger. I will appreciate the additional head space and seat height, and hoping that in the meantime they do v3 or v4 of the seats.
microdrum 7y ago
Stream just went offline. Anyone have a link?
- microdrum 7y ago
  Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE
henvic 7y ago
Here is the link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
  That video link shows as unavailable.
  - henvic 7y ago
    Yeah, I saw that but somehow I'm still watching it in another tab.
localhost 7y ago
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.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  I wonder what the ratio of fleet-driving bytes collected is for Tesla vs Waymo vs the other big players...
- justapassenger 7y ago
  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.
jes 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- tim333 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ
tim333 7y ago
New link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ (replay after the livestream ended)
sharadov 7y ago
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!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- personlurking 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
johnvega 7y ago
This is the most exciting technology (software & hardware) and business event in a long time.
eastendguy 7y ago
Ok, I am late to the show. Where can I watch the recording?
- tim333 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ
dougmwne 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
RivieraKid 7y ago
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-inaccurate-in-self-driving-comparison-2019-04-22 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccura... 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-dolgov-waymo-autonomous-cars/ https://events.technologyreview.com/video/watch/dmitri-dolgo...
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-tesla-musk-panasonic-20190422-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-tesla-musk-panason... the fact that suppliers don't like them has been a red flag for a while now bulls and dreamers don't want to pay any attention to the very imminent problems with tesla's financials and furthermore tesla's executive record there's a very good reason bears refer to him as fraudboy but watching him scam taxpayers/unfortunately gullible people/govt (my fav ex. battery swap zev credits) while people fan over him and his company is pretty amazing also the list of lawsuits...
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  2020? Try 2040.
- antpls 7y ago
cromwellian 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
agumonkey 7y ago
I wonder how commaai is taking the news. Fleet + imitation was their angle too.
tdhttt 7y ago
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)?
torpfactory 7y ago
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
kapravel 7y ago
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
Animats 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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."
WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
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.
Chico11Kidlet 7y ago
The only thing that makes sense is that Elon is a time traveler from the future. Nothing else makes sense. He knows what is going to happen. That's how he speaks so confidently about LIDAR's uselessness.
tim333 7y ago
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_demo_slowed_down_with_blownup_augmented/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgb9or/fsd_dem...
bg24 7y ago
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.
rick22 7y ago
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.
fizzledbits 7y ago
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.

360 points by kiddz 7y ago

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

tigershark 7y ago
Yes, I was feeling dumb watching the same thing in a loop, hopefully they’ll start soon with the real meat...

deleted 7y ago

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godelski 7y ago

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

typo_hunter 7y ago
11am Pacific Standard Tesla Time, the conversion to PST is iffy
- godelski 7y ago
  Looks like it is ~+40 mins
Animats 7y ago
The Verge says "The event was slated to start at 2PM ET (but is running a little late)". Still showing car commercial type clips.
martythemaniak 7y ago
I feel Tesla livestreams are very much like their cars - they never launch on time, but when they eventually do, they're pretty good and worth the wait.

jak92 7y ago

How much b-roll do they have?

sea-shore 7y ago
Maybe it is a test to see when the AI generating the video breaks
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

netinstructions 7y ago

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

tigershark 7y ago
Maybe too much confident if you ask me..
- netinstructions 7y ago
  I agree. The interview with MIT researcher Lex Fridman was difficult to watch because it didn't seem like they were on the same page at all - Lex asking thoughtful and pointed questions and Elon dismissing them as if the questions themselves are moot because self driving is right around the corner. It was mind boggling. I am hoping Tesla can provide some specifics today because it seems Elon is living in a fantasy world (albeit one I'd like to live in if we can actually get safe self-driving cars).
  - LoSboccacc 7y ago
    I'm gonna say Elon is being extremely bold selling a technology that's current leader in deaths behind the autonomous wheels. also I can't reconcile how the new hardware is this huge leap ahead beyond raw computing power if, by Tesla own claims, previous hardware was perfectly capable of autonomous driving. seems people were getting fooled either now or before.
dforrestwilson 7y ago
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=2ahUKEwiR7KHlq-ThAhUPHzQIHYU2DqEQzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibtimes.com%2Felon-musks-tesla-surprisingly-fails-lead-autonomous-driving-technology-2786913&psig=AOvVaw1gWIsj1jFDhjHpGWy2DVii&ust=1556044547357367 https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiR... 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-strategy-is-outdated-and-possibly-dangerous/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/teslas-self-driving-str...

kempbellt 7y ago

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

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

iandanforth 7y ago

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 7y ago
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)
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  > 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. If you think this is a new thing, you haven't followed the car industry much. Just as an example, my 2002 el cheapo Peugot was bought without the option to show instantaneous MPG/average MPG/range/etc. Spend two hours soldering/gluing on the missing $2 toggle switch, ask a friend with the Peugeot Planet update tool to enable it in software, and Bob's your auntie. It goes much further than that though, especially when you get into chip tuning. Software upgrades that add 50 horsepower to your engine output are commonplace. But as for the "actively hostile to 3rd party repairs/mods", this part scares me to.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    I can sort of understand the software differentiation - I have no issue with Windows Home and Pro editions having different price points even thought the code on the disc is identical for instance(maybe that's hypocritical of me?). But I do have an issue with paying for hardware(heated seats in this case) and that hardware being disabled until a payment is made. I don't know, it just feels different.

filleokus 7y ago

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 7y ago
Surprisingly technical versus what I'd expected, but it is targeted specifically at investors.
- whitepoplar 7y ago
  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.

2bitencryption 7y ago

...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.

mattrp 7y ago
If you’ve listened to their earnings calls this is par for the course. Say what you will about his tweets, but I find these discussions fantastically informative and transparent.
- isoprophlex 7y ago
  absolutely glorious, they're taking questions. first question: can you use anything else besides ReLU activations in your neural net engine? this is wonderful
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    ...is it? I don't know the context here but it feels like they're trying to ML-splain Karpathy?
  - 2bitencryption 7y ago
    what a funny question. "you say you can put bananas in your smoothie. just a thought, but perhaps, might I ask, do you have the capability to put strawberries as well, or are we not there yet?"
    - pixelpp 7y ago
      haha
    - chrisa 7y ago
      That was my first instinct to that question as well, but I think he was just asking if ReLU was required by the hardware design - or if it was possible to use other activation functions as well. If the the ReLU was part of the hardware itself somehow, then it wouldn't be possible to use tanh or sigmoid (which may be better in certain situations); so I think he was just asking if ReLU was required, or if there was flexibility allowed in the activation function.

schintan 7y ago

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

ham_sandwich 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    > 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."

cmsonger 7y ago

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.

mattrp 7y ago
I’m wondering what new spinoff comes from the hardware... does it have benefits / application to anything in addition to AD?
Ardon 7y ago
There's another one of these coming about the software specifically.
DeonPenny 7y ago
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.

Animats 7y ago

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.

Animats 7y ago
Musk says there will be a driving demo later today. Up next, the neural nets person.
- dwighttk 7y ago
  how did the demo go? Is there separate video?
est31 7y ago
> "All we need to do is improve the software" - Musk [12:07 PDT] That's an old claim, see this 2016 press release [1]: > as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. At this point I believe the claim once I see the self-driving functionality having been rolled out to the public and the accident number been reduced. [1]: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
isoprophlex 7y ago
"LIDAR is a fool's errand. Everyone relying on LIDAR is doomed." edit: beat me to it
- vasilipupkin 7y ago
  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

sahin-boydas 7y ago

It is pretty techincal. Wow. Great. Thank you Tesla.

jacquesm 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    If anything it'd be detrimental since it would allow more people to drive longer and more often.
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secfirstmd 7y ago

Musk: "Lidar is a fools errand" Let's hope he is right.

swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
"It's like having two appendices. One appendix is bad"
- dwighttk 7y ago
  I don't know the context for this, but one appendix isn't bad... appendicitis is bad.
  - mynameisvlad 7y ago
    He means the appendices in a book.
    - dwighttk 7y ago
      I just watched the 5minute distillation and I’m pretty sure he was talking about the organ.

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grey-area 7y ago

“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 7y ago
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?
- Hamuko 7y ago
  >I wonder if he's going to explain this position at all? Doubt it.
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.

andr 7y ago

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 7y ago
something I don't understand, is this chip brand new? is it essential to the autonomous drive?
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  Chip is new and is needed for autonomous driving
Traster 7y ago
Can they actually do a 96x96 dot product in a single cycle? My understanding was that they can do 1 96x96 dot product per cycle - that is to say that their throughput is a 96x96 dot product but it'll be heavily pipelined.

VikingCoder 7y ago

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?

ryanlol 7y ago
Are any cars ever as safe as you want?
- VikingCoder 7y ago
  Society has decided how to judge whether I am safe to drive, and I have passed the tests. I worry that the laws on the books are insufficient to judge whether a computer is safe to drive. If Tesla already has plans to increase safety, I'd like to know how they judge it, where they think they are, where they'd like to improve, etc. As a voter.
  - stevep98 7y ago
    I think there is a lot of scope for an autonomous vehicle to be safer than a human driver. Consider: 1) computer has faster reaction times. 2) 360-degree awareness 3) better awareness of vehicle performance. Imagine a scenario where you are at speed and get a tire blowout. The car can sense it instantly through tire pressure sensor, and counter the swerve appropriately - something that humans are very poorly prepared or practiced for. Alternatively, a driver in a neighboring lane makes an unsafe lane change into your lane. The car sees him, honks the horn, moves/brakes/accelerates to avoid the other car, before you've even seen whats happening.
djtriptych 7y ago
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.
- 7y ago

paul_42 7y ago

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

jefft255 7y ago
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).

Hamuko 7y ago

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".

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iandanforth 7y ago

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 7y ago
It was pointed out that All data is anonymized.
- iandanforth 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- salawat 7y ago
  Bull. You can't say "You can query for anything!" and have it be anonymized. In fact, if you're taking a camera shot, that's the most broadband sensor imaginable, and no thanks, I don't trust any company with profit motive not to crumble and pop out a software update to selectively disable picture blurrers, or to not have a Boolean flag in your data scrubber. As a company, making that statement is just trying to slip one past and hope nobody asks inconvenient questions about it.
  - deleted 7y ago

fossuser 7y ago

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.

grey-area 7y ago
This software talk is fascinating and a great introduction to neural nets.
dwighttk 7y ago
"many times better than competitors" "next gen that will be 3x better to ship in a couple years" applying psudomathematical varnish to marketing-speak
- fossuser 7y ago
  I was summarizing - they gave explicit technical details in the talk.
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    Nvidia says they were comparing against an inferior chip https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccurate-in-self-driving-comparison-2019-04-22 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccura...
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  The talk was extremely technical
sytelus 7y ago
> 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?

sackroyd 7y ago

Uber and Lyft are fucked.

joetribiani 7y ago
How so?
- gpm 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

donmatito 7y ago

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" ?

mellow-lake-day 7y ago

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

sairahul82 7y ago

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.

slg 7y ago
>Karpathy's presentation is really good. Watch it later if you get some time. I would second this recommendation. He did a really good job not only explaining Tesla's approach, but also breaking down the concepts in an easy to understand way for laypeople. That is a rare skill to have especially among someone who is obviously so technically accomplished.
- chibg10 7y ago
  Based on what I know about how high-level executive meetings and presentations (which is the role Karpathy is playing here) go, there's a pretty good chance the presentation was not actually developed by Karpathy but a Tesla team of significant size.
DeonPenny 7y ago
It was great including his explanation of how Tesla drives in snow and rain which is hard to understand how a car can do it.
tjoff 7y ago
Does anyone doing lidar not also do visual recognition?

VikingCoder 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
sixQuarks 7y ago
I’ve been driving for nearly 30 years and have never even seen one person going 140mph, yet alone dozens
- 1123581321 7y ago
  The person who wrote that doesn’t realize how fast 140 would seem. That kind of speed differential is not something you can attempt to avoid. Even 100 vs. 70 is rare, and the safest thing to do given that differential is nothing. This is not an area any car company should worry about.

Traster 7y ago

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.

tomComb 7y ago
I'm a fan of Tesla, but not Musk. You really can't believe much that comes out of his mouth. If you look at his past claims it becomes clear that he should just be ignored.
- willio58 7y ago
  Being the fan of a company while completely ignoring the ceo of said company is questionable to me.
  - tomComb 7y ago
    Tesla has great products, created and supported by thousands of people who appear to go above and beyond. Kudos to them. And kudos to Musk for the vision and the early execution, but that doesn't mean I have to like him or believe that he is the right person for this phase of the companies growth.
- davej 7y ago
  > If you look at his past claims it becomes clear that he should just be ignored. What's an example of this? His timelines are often much too aggressive for reality but he repeatedly delivers (eventually).

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JoshTko 7y ago

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.

nopriorarrests 7y ago

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

rootusrootus 7y ago
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.

breatheoften 7y ago

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 7y ago
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
DeonPenny 7y ago
Nope his engineers have talked about this long before he did. More than likely they convinced him not the other way around.

grecy 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
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sharadov 7y ago
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.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  If the current state of autopilot is even tangentially related to their progress on full self-driving, then it's a lot more than a few years away.
  - danhak 7y ago
    How recent is your experience? I’ve owned a Model 3 for over a year and the pace at which autopilot has been improving is staggering.
    - rootusrootus 7y ago
      I did a road trip this weekend and used autopilot for more than 400 miles on a brand new P3D (with the FSD option, limited though it is right now). Mostly freeway, some rural roads. Here are my observations, I assume it's pretty typical but obviously all I have is anecdata. Lane following works effectively, but it wanders a bit. Mostly not enough to be bothersome, though sometimes it will hug one side or the other close enough to make me think about the big truck next to me. Sometimes a little late reacting to a curve, though not to the point of going across the line. Planned lane changes work pretty nicely. Identification of vehicles around the car is good towards the front and noticeably spotty to the rear quadrants. It reliably misidentifies the merging traffic lane as one big lane as soon as the line ends, and promptly drives to the right to straddle the 'middle' and then corrects as the line converges to the normal width. Adaptive cruise control is flat out disappointing. Granted, I've never driven anyone else's automation, but it actually made me motion sick at times. I thought it did a really admirable job of handling people merging right in front of the nose of my car without jamming the brakes. Just smoothly slipped back until the right following distance was achieved. But in open traffic, when I came up on another car, it would abruptly slow down a bit too aggressively, and then fiddle with the speed a bit until it matched the leading car. If the lead car switched lanes, it waited until several seconds after the car was in the next lane and then abruptly sped up to the programmed max speed. There were times I could tell how frustrating this style was to people behind us who were not using a similar system. Twice it braked suddenly, though not any kind of panic stop, and then immediately sped back up. Like it saw something concerning and then changed it's mind a split second later. Made my wife a little nervous after the second time, but it didn't happen again the rest of our trip. Overall I'd classify it as a moderately drunk driver :). I let it drive us into a couple moderately uncomfortable merge situations just to see how it would deal with traffic entering the freeway, and while it didn't get us in a wreck or anything, it didn't make me feel like AP is on the verge of becoming viable FSD. For what it's worth, this was on I-5 in between Portland and Seattle, in mostly light traffic. We have what are, in my experience, pretty easy relaxed freeway configurations. Long ramps, no ramp lights, etc. I borrowed the P3D so I could have myself an extended test drive to decide if I really wanted a Model 3 or not. Wicked fast (which is still an understatement), I love the power but would probably choose to steer it myself for the forseable future. I wish they'd put in nicer seats (like, my legs were getting numb at one point!), just standard Recaros like everyone else would be perfectly nice. I think I've decided that I really like it but I'm going to wait for Model Y before pulling the trigger. I will appreciate the additional head space and seat height, and hoping that in the meantime they do v3 or v4 of the seats.

microdrum 7y ago

Stream just went offline. Anyone have a link?

microdrum 7y ago
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE

henvic 7y ago

Here is the link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE

deleted 7y ago
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IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
That video link shows as unavailable.
- henvic 7y ago
  Yeah, I saw that but somehow I'm still watching it in another tab.

localhost 7y ago

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.

WhompingWindows 7y ago
I wonder what the ratio of fleet-driving bytes collected is for Tesla vs Waymo vs the other big players...
justapassenger 7y ago
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.

jes 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
tim333 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ

tim333 7y ago

New link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ (replay after the livestream ended)

sharadov 7y ago

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!

deleted 7y ago
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personlurking 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

johnvega 7y ago

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

eastendguy 7y ago

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

tim333 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgtGQIygZQ

dougmwne 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

RivieraKid 7y ago

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-inaccurate-in-self-driving-comparison-2019-04-22 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-says-tesla-inaccura... 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-dolgov-waymo-autonomous-cars/ https://events.technologyreview.com/video/watch/dmitri-dolgo...

hi5eyes 7y ago
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-tesla-musk-panasonic-20190422-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-tesla-musk-panason... the fact that suppliers don't like them has been a red flag for a while now bulls and dreamers don't want to pay any attention to the very imminent problems with tesla's financials and furthermore tesla's executive record there's a very good reason bears refer to him as fraudboy but watching him scam taxpayers/unfortunately gullible people/govt (my fav ex. battery swap zev credits) while people fan over him and his company is pretty amazing also the list of lawsuits...
eanzenberg 7y ago
2020? Try 2040.
antpls 7y ago

cromwellian 7y ago

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 7y ago
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?

agumonkey 7y ago

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

tdhttt 7y ago

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)?

torpfactory 7y ago

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

kapravel 7y ago

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

Animats 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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."

WheelsAtLarge 7y ago

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.

Chico11Kidlet 7y ago

The only thing that makes sense is that Elon is a time traveler from the future. Nothing else makes sense. He knows what is going to happen. That's how he speaks so confidently about LIDAR's uselessness.

tim333 7y ago

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_demo_slowed_down_with_blownup_augmented/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgb9or/fsd_dem...

bg24 7y ago

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.

rick22 7y ago

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.

fizzledbits 7y ago

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.