12 ms·

I dunno, self-driving is an interesting computer-vision / machine-learning problem and it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG comp

I dunno, self-driving is an interesting computer-vision / machine-learning problem and it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on. For anyone working in the field, the end goal is extremely rewarding in terms of the long-term beneficial impact on society it would have and the numerous lives it would save. I don't think Tesla is going to drop FSD R&D anytime soon. They've also built out amazing software infrastructure under Karpathy's leadership to make use of their fleet of hundreds of thousands of cars to run shadow experiments with newer models in the background and continuously collect more difficult and interesting training data so they can improve their models and their internal test-sets for tracking metrics. They are also a relatively lean team from what I've heard, so it's not like they are bankrolling hundreds of very expensive ML PhDs at the moment. It is debatable if they (or anyone else) will "solve" FSD with current approaches, but I think the technology is already pretty fascinating and useful.

shaan7 5y ago
> it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
- wiz21c 5y ago
  Yup double yup ! > numerous lives it would save If you want to save lives, work on malnutrition, reducing coal energy, water access, basic vaccines, etc. You'll have a much greater impact.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    These are political problems, it's a different skillset.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    Globally around 1.3 million people are killed in motor accidents yearly and tens of millions more are permanently disabled (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...). In comparison there are around 0.4 million malaria deaths annually (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria). So eliminating motor accidents would save around 3x more lives than curing malaria.
    - bildung 5y ago
      This is indeed a problem, but Denmark's highways right now have 1/6 of the death rate of US highways, so if saving lives actually was the goal, AI isn't exactly the low hanging fruit.
      - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
        What’s the point of comparing the US to countries that are as populous as the DC metro area? There are so many factors at play the comparison is completely meaningless.
        bildung 5y ago
        Death rate is calculated as deaths per billion miles driven, so I don't see how the respective populations matter here. One could make the argument that population density is important to consider, but in the US the less populated states have higher death rates IIRC.
        jcims 5y ago
        Where are you getting those stats? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... Denmark (like most countries) are definitely better at not getting killed on the road, but closer to a factor of two by miles driven and four per capita.
        bildung 5y ago
        From here (and my number was indeed wrong, its 1/5, not 1/6): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#United_States_compared_to_other_nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
        martin8412 5y ago
        Don't worry about it to be honest. The guy is just giving the typical American response. Nothing that works in every single other country in the world could possibly work in the US due to their size. Nevermind the fact that it works in less or more populated countries. It just can't possibly work in the US. For other examples look at how the only way to deal with trash in New York is to throw it on the street or how California has huge forest fires almost every year due to powerlines falling.. If only there was a solution to those already solved problems
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Graffur 5y ago
    How can we get jobs in these areas or do you mean to start businesses in these areas?
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    I'm sure there will be a ton of residual effects from FSD. One off the top of my head being Emergency Services will be able to respond to emergencies faster because of minimized road congestion.
    - scrose 5y ago
      History has shown that when you make driving easier, people drive more.
      - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
        And? Does that matter if we have better capacity/congestion planning because all the cars are self driving. There's so much wasted time in traffic and excess congestion because humans are at the wheel creating chaotic traffic fluctuations by their driving.
        scrose 5y ago
        Yes. That does matter, a lot. Look up induced demand. Also consider that full-self driving will likely mean more cars on the road that don't even have a person in them. Traffic backups and delays aren't just created from people crashing, it's because when you take a a dozen tiny humans and you put each of them in mostly > 15foot long cars, you now have 12 people managing to take up over 180 feet of space. Speeding up emergency services is a solved problem. You take a lane that is filled with single-occupant vehicles, and you dedicate that to efficient forms of transit, whether it be a high-speed bus lane or a bike lane. Emergency services will not only opt to use that the majority of the time, they will also be less likely to crash with another vehicle due to not needing to weave lane to lane. Hope this helps.
- p1esk 5y ago
  Nope. The best minds work on whatever they're interested in (this includes making better ads): https://ai.facebook.com/research https://ai.facebook.com/research https://research.google/research-areas/ https://research.google/research-areas/
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    That’s definitely not true. The smartest (clearly not the best if you take conscience into account) minds of today work either in ad farms or as money movers. You can sugarcoat it however you want but if you work in google or Facebook you definitely are just farming ads but with extra steps.
    - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
      Maybe in tech, but not in bio.
      - PatentlyDC123 5y ago
        Or nearly any other field, e.g., mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry/chemical engineering, nearly any of the sciences involved in the medical field (from pharmacology to psychology to name a few). Even "softer" fields like law and literature have present day geniuses pioneering new ground. I understand that HackerNews is tech centered, but some times when I read "the best minds of my generation are doing X" I wonder if the commenter can see the flashes of brilliance shining beyond their field or what they know as "tech."
        DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
        Totally agree. I'm surprised I was downvoted for my comment?
    - p1esk 5y ago
      Hinton and Lecun are two of the smartest people working at Google/FB, and they don't work in ad farms or as money movers.
- Graffur 5y ago
  Are they really the 'best' minds if that is what they choose to do? Not in my opinion.
  - piva00 5y ago
    I'd change "the best minds" to the "some of the most educated and technically prepared minds". And it's not only to click ads, there is a whole lot of engineers (even more in poorer countries such as Brazil) who end up working in banks and finance, mostly to deal with complex spreadsheets. It's a complete waste of educational investment.
    - MperorM 5y ago
      Spreadsheets and finance has tremendous value!
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - wyre 5y ago
    I think their described as ‘best’ minds because they graduated top of their class at Ivy League, leading California school, etc.
  - hoseja 5y ago
    Well, the idea is that they demand the highest salary and those who pay the highest salary are companies interested in improving ad-clicking. It's not "abstractly best" but "empirically best". If you get the most money, you are by some definition the best.
    - p1esk 5y ago
      The companies might be interested in add clicking, but they are willing to hire extraordinary people who work on whatever they feel like.
  - nickalaso 5y ago
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  But, indirectly it becomes an interesting problem (nlp research). If we didn't have people playing / making video games then we wouldn't have figured out GPU acceleration to use with deep networks (backpropagation is fast when you can do matrix multiplication fast).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- GuB-42 5y ago
  > Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” That's better than when the best minds are thinking about how to kill people. Anyways, it is a good thing that even if the end goal is far from noble, most of the times, invest enough in R&D and positive things come out of it.
- devonkim 5y ago
  I’ve heard it also as “making global scale dopamine delivery systems” when bringing in social media KPIs and other addiction-driven engagement like modern gaming monetization models
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  On the other hand, “The average minds of my generation are thinking about Instagram.”
uncomputation 5y ago
> it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on It’s not really about interesting for most people, it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this? I’m all for noble pursuits but don’t put down the trillion dollar smartphone, social media, PC markets that have long established themselves for the product we don’t even know is possible yet
- emilgouliev 5y ago
  > It’s not really about interesting for most people, it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this? This is so asinine. Just because some R&D project is the most profitable thing FAANG companies can invest in doesn't mean it's actually the best allocation of resources for the people working on it. Market fundamentalism is a brain disease.
- _coveredInBees 5y ago
  > It’s not really about interesting for most people This is an absolutely ludicrous statement. A very large number of people absolutely do prioritize what is interesting to them when it comes to their career. No one is going to be dirt poor, busking on the streets to make ends meet because they decided to work on self-driving tech. Nor is Tesla in any dire situation that they can't afford to fund their well-paid team of 20-25 ML engineers.
- azangru 5y ago
  > it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this? I am sure Tesla employees can pay their mortgages.
tachyonbeam 5y ago
I think Karpathy at Tesla has basically unlimited funding, Tesla is developing custom hardware. They've already deployed said hardware in the wild, and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving. We also don't know what his pay situation is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had multimillion dollar bonuses tied to various milestones. I know if I were Elon Musk, I wouldn't want to lose the guy. So sure, he could leave, but to do what? To start building something similar from scratch somewhere else? He could go to Waymo to find that he went from being the project leader to an underling, and that Waymo is not using the approach he wants to use (he designed the Tesla project, and it's close to pure deep learning). IMO, unless something goes really wrong at Tesla, he will stay, because they're so close to success, surely he wants to see what happens, because the payout will be huge.
- fastball 5y ago
  I'd actually say they're closer than Waymo to FSD, given that Waymo's solution relies on much more expensive tech and high fidelity 3D mapping. To my mind you're not true FSD until your car can drive literally anywhere an average human could, and I'm not sure that's possible with Waymo's solution until they've mapped the entire world.
  - ra7 5y ago
    You don’t get to be closer to FSD just because you have a grander vision of driving everywhere a human could. They have to actually demonstrate it. It’s been years and Tesla still doesn’t have the confidence to let drivers take their hands off the wheel.. you know, the true test of self driving. So how exactly are they close?
    - fastball 5y ago
      I didn't say "close", I said closer. Full self-driving (e.g. "Level 5") is driving everywhere a human can. I have doubts that Waymo will ever get to Level 5 without 3D mapping the entire world, which (to me) sounds like a somewhat intractable problem. There is a lot of world, and it is constantly changing. The problem here is the "level" system everyone has been told is the standard, which heavily implies that if you're at "3" while someone else is at "2", then you're closer to "5". This isn't really true though because solutions at Level X don't necessarily scale/work at Level Y. I dislike using the level system for this reason. I think Tesla is closer because they are certainly getting there[1], and I believe their model (relying entirely on CV) is the one that has the greatest likelihood of stretching to FSD (Level 5 autonomy). Mostly because there is only one system we're aware of that can achieve FSD (humans), and the sensory package there is entirely visual. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_zTZjCCoxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_zTZjCCoxo
JPKab 5y ago
I agree that Tesla dropping FSD would take a while. In addition to the huge sunk-cost and investor expectations, they have an entire strategy (via 3 year vehicle leases which are currently offering no-buyout for customers at termination) of monetizing leased vehicles as robo-taxis. Not saying they will succeed here, but just saying that to give up on FSD would be corporate suicide at this point.

shaan7 5y ago

> it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

wiz21c 5y ago
Yup double yup ! > numerous lives it would save If you want to save lives, work on malnutrition, reducing coal energy, water access, basic vaccines, etc. You'll have a much greater impact.
- XorNot 5y ago
  These are political problems, it's a different skillset.
- logicchains 5y ago
  Globally around 1.3 million people are killed in motor accidents yearly and tens of millions more are permanently disabled (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...). In comparison there are around 0.4 million malaria deaths annually (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria). So eliminating motor accidents would save around 3x more lives than curing malaria.
  - bildung 5y ago
    This is indeed a problem, but Denmark's highways right now have 1/6 of the death rate of US highways, so if saving lives actually was the goal, AI isn't exactly the low hanging fruit.
    - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
      What’s the point of comparing the US to countries that are as populous as the DC metro area? There are so many factors at play the comparison is completely meaningless.
      - bildung 5y ago
        Death rate is calculated as deaths per billion miles driven, so I don't see how the respective populations matter here. One could make the argument that population density is important to consider, but in the US the less populated states have higher death rates IIRC.
        jcims 5y ago
        Where are you getting those stats? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... Denmark (like most countries) are definitely better at not getting killed on the road, but closer to a factor of two by miles driven and four per capita.
        bildung 5y ago
        From here (and my number was indeed wrong, its 1/5, not 1/6): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#United_States_compared_to_other_nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
        martin8412 5y ago
        Don't worry about it to be honest. The guy is just giving the typical American response. Nothing that works in every single other country in the world could possibly work in the US due to their size. Nevermind the fact that it works in less or more populated countries. It just can't possibly work in the US. For other examples look at how the only way to deal with trash in New York is to throw it on the street or how California has huge forest fires almost every year due to powerlines falling.. If only there was a solution to those already solved problems
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Graffur 5y ago
  How can we get jobs in these areas or do you mean to start businesses in these areas?
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  I'm sure there will be a ton of residual effects from FSD. One off the top of my head being Emergency Services will be able to respond to emergencies faster because of minimized road congestion.
  - scrose 5y ago
    History has shown that when you make driving easier, people drive more.
    - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
      And? Does that matter if we have better capacity/congestion planning because all the cars are self driving. There's so much wasted time in traffic and excess congestion because humans are at the wheel creating chaotic traffic fluctuations by their driving.
      - scrose 5y ago
        Yes. That does matter, a lot. Look up induced demand. Also consider that full-self driving will likely mean more cars on the road that don't even have a person in them. Traffic backups and delays aren't just created from people crashing, it's because when you take a a dozen tiny humans and you put each of them in mostly > 15foot long cars, you now have 12 people managing to take up over 180 feet of space. Speeding up emergency services is a solved problem. You take a lane that is filled with single-occupant vehicles, and you dedicate that to efficient forms of transit, whether it be a high-speed bus lane or a bike lane. Emergency services will not only opt to use that the majority of the time, they will also be less likely to crash with another vehicle due to not needing to weave lane to lane. Hope this helps.
p1esk 5y ago
Nope. The best minds work on whatever they're interested in (this includes making better ads): https://ai.facebook.com/research https://ai.facebook.com/research https://research.google/research-areas/ https://research.google/research-areas/
- ramraj07 5y ago
  That’s definitely not true. The smartest (clearly not the best if you take conscience into account) minds of today work either in ad farms or as money movers. You can sugarcoat it however you want but if you work in google or Facebook you definitely are just farming ads but with extra steps.
  - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
    Maybe in tech, but not in bio.
    - PatentlyDC123 5y ago
      Or nearly any other field, e.g., mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry/chemical engineering, nearly any of the sciences involved in the medical field (from pharmacology to psychology to name a few). Even "softer" fields like law and literature have present day geniuses pioneering new ground. I understand that HackerNews is tech centered, but some times when I read "the best minds of my generation are doing X" I wonder if the commenter can see the flashes of brilliance shining beyond their field or what they know as "tech."
      - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
        Totally agree. I'm surprised I was downvoted for my comment?
  - p1esk 5y ago
    Hinton and Lecun are two of the smartest people working at Google/FB, and they don't work in ad farms or as money movers.
Graffur 5y ago
Are they really the 'best' minds if that is what they choose to do? Not in my opinion.
- piva00 5y ago
  I'd change "the best minds" to the "some of the most educated and technically prepared minds". And it's not only to click ads, there is a whole lot of engineers (even more in poorer countries such as Brazil) who end up working in banks and finance, mostly to deal with complex spreadsheets. It's a complete waste of educational investment.
  - MperorM 5y ago
    Spreadsheets and finance has tremendous value!
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- wyre 5y ago
  I think their described as ‘best’ minds because they graduated top of their class at Ivy League, leading California school, etc.
- hoseja 5y ago
  Well, the idea is that they demand the highest salary and those who pay the highest salary are companies interested in improving ad-clicking. It's not "abstractly best" but "empirically best". If you get the most money, you are by some definition the best.
  - p1esk 5y ago
    The companies might be interested in add clicking, but they are willing to hire extraordinary people who work on whatever they feel like.
- nickalaso 5y ago
zitterbewegung 5y ago
But, indirectly it becomes an interesting problem (nlp research). If we didn't have people playing / making video games then we wouldn't have figured out GPU acceleration to use with deep networks (backpropagation is fast when you can do matrix multiplication fast).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
GuB-42 5y ago
> Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” That's better than when the best minds are thinking about how to kill people. Anyways, it is a good thing that even if the end goal is far from noble, most of the times, invest enough in R&D and positive things come out of it.
devonkim 5y ago
I’ve heard it also as “making global scale dopamine delivery systems” when bringing in social media KPIs and other addiction-driven engagement like modern gaming monetization models
an_opabinia 5y ago
On the other hand, “The average minds of my generation are thinking about Instagram.”

uncomputation 5y ago

> it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on It’s not really about interesting for most people, it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this? I’m all for noble pursuits but don’t put down the trillion dollar smartphone, social media, PC markets that have long established themselves for the product we don’t even know is possible yet

emilgouliev 5y ago
> It’s not really about interesting for most people, it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this? This is so asinine. Just because some R&D project is the most profitable thing FAANG companies can invest in doesn't mean it's actually the best allocation of resources for the people working on it. Market fundamentalism is a brain disease.
_coveredInBees 5y ago
> It’s not really about interesting for most people This is an absolutely ludicrous statement. A very large number of people absolutely do prioritize what is interesting to them when it comes to their career. No one is going to be dirt poor, busking on the streets to make ends meet because they decided to work on self-driving tech. Nor is Tesla in any dire situation that they can't afford to fund their well-paid team of 20-25 ML engineers.
azangru 5y ago
> it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this? I am sure Tesla employees can pay their mortgages.

tachyonbeam 5y ago

I think Karpathy at Tesla has basically unlimited funding, Tesla is developing custom hardware. They've already deployed said hardware in the wild, and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving. We also don't know what his pay situation is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had multimillion dollar bonuses tied to various milestones. I know if I were Elon Musk, I wouldn't want to lose the guy. So sure, he could leave, but to do what? To start building something similar from scratch somewhere else? He could go to Waymo to find that he went from being the project leader to an underling, and that Waymo is not using the approach he wants to use (he designed the Tesla project, and it's close to pure deep learning). IMO, unless something goes really wrong at Tesla, he will stay, because they're so close to success, surely he wants to see what happens, because the payout will be huge.

fastball 5y ago
I'd actually say they're closer than Waymo to FSD, given that Waymo's solution relies on much more expensive tech and high fidelity 3D mapping. To my mind you're not true FSD until your car can drive literally anywhere an average human could, and I'm not sure that's possible with Waymo's solution until they've mapped the entire world.
- ra7 5y ago
  You don’t get to be closer to FSD just because you have a grander vision of driving everywhere a human could. They have to actually demonstrate it. It’s been years and Tesla still doesn’t have the confidence to let drivers take their hands off the wheel.. you know, the true test of self driving. So how exactly are they close?
  - fastball 5y ago
    I didn't say "close", I said closer. Full self-driving (e.g. "Level 5") is driving everywhere a human can. I have doubts that Waymo will ever get to Level 5 without 3D mapping the entire world, which (to me) sounds like a somewhat intractable problem. There is a lot of world, and it is constantly changing. The problem here is the "level" system everyone has been told is the standard, which heavily implies that if you're at "3" while someone else is at "2", then you're closer to "5". This isn't really true though because solutions at Level X don't necessarily scale/work at Level Y. I dislike using the level system for this reason. I think Tesla is closer because they are certainly getting there[1], and I believe their model (relying entirely on CV) is the one that has the greatest likelihood of stretching to FSD (Level 5 autonomy). Mostly because there is only one system we're aware of that can achieve FSD (humans), and the sensory package there is entirely visual. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_zTZjCCoxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_zTZjCCoxo

JPKab 5y ago

I agree that Tesla dropping FSD would take a while. In addition to the huge sunk-cost and investor expectations, they have an entire strategy (via 3 year vehicle leases which are currently offering no-buyout for customers at termination) of monetizing leased vehicles as robo-taxis. Not saying they will succeed here, but just saying that to give up on FSD would be corporate suicide at this point.