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A 100x Investment (2019)

127 points by allenleee 4y ago

allenleee 4y ago
Part 2: https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
Pakdef 4y ago
I need to switch my car so that I could buy a comma.ai and use it at its full potential (my Mazda's steering motor isn't powerful enough)
learndeeply 4y ago
Article was posted in 2019, in case other people missed it like I did.
rootcage 4y ago
You mention that tesla and comma have similar technical infrastructure. Tesla is doing or has done many of the caveats you describe about other companies, can you dig deeper into Tesla as a competitor?
- JoshCole 4y ago
  What are the shared caveats you are thinking of? The caveats that stood out to me were that he mentions: lidar usage inflating costs, targeting ride sharing as path to profitability, and using VC money to fund non-mission goals prior to profitability. Tesla doesn't use lidar, is already profitable without having targeted ride sharing as the path to that, and is already default alive and not dependent on VC money.
- kjksf 4y ago
  The big architectural (and business strategy) difference between Tesla and more or less everyone else (Waymo, Cruise, Apple...) is: - doesn't rely on lidar - doesn't rely on pre-mapping areas - ships intermediary products vs. big bang approach of "100% self-driving or nothing" - makes money on those intermediary products (vs. loosing money until the big bang) - while everyone is using Deep Learning for solving the problem, I believe Tesla is betting on DL / AI harder than most On those big points Comma is exactly like Tesla and unlike almost everyone else. I'm not sure which caveats you meant.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "big bang approach". There isn't a single company whose goal is 100% or nothing. Not cruise, nor waymo, nor anyone else. That's why they have things like remote assistance and incremental rollouts. Similarly, waymo and cruise are both making [small amounts of] money on their "intermediary" robotaxis right now.
    - JoshCole 4y ago
      http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html is contextually relevant to the point you don't understand the meaning of. They are operating in an abstracted representation of the situation related to what Paul Graham talks about. In that abstracted representation you get some not so obvious corollaries: a deep relationship between confidence and the reasonableness of default alive versus default dead strategy.
agumonkey 4y ago
any actual user still on this project ? i wonder if it's stable or improving
- md2020 4y ago
  It is stable and is improving. I have a Comma 3 in my car and use it almost every time I drive. The team is also very active in the company’s Discord.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    Interesting, hotz really went into stealth mode since a few years back. Much better I guess.
  - raylad 4y ago
    One major reason I've hesitated to buy a Comma is because it seems that it won't apply enough steering force in (most? any?) cars to reliably be able to navigate any turn, and it also won't let you know in advance if it can't do that. So in the middle of a turn it may just not be able to steer enough and you have to suddenly take over. I know you have to be aware and be ready to take over in any case (and when I've driven a Tesla it's tried to kill me at least a couple of times every day), but for some reason I really want anything I buy for driver assistance to be able to apply enough force for any turn. Am I mistaken about that or what's your experience?
twelve40 4y ago
i go to their website comma.ai and for the life of me cannot figure out what this is and what they are asking $2000 from me for. "Chill driving"?? Maybe a bit of explanation would help? or is it even active anymore?
- bm-rf 4y ago
  I think the tricky part for them is that the hardware and the software need to be marketed differently in order for this to be legal. Out of the box, the comma 3 only functions as a dash cam. You need to personally load openpilot onto it. I guess it's not possible (or wise) to sell a self driving kit currently, but selling a dash cam that just so happens to work really well with openpilot is.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    I'm surprised the law's developed enough for that, I'd think it would be on the (non-)driver either way.
- itchyouch 4y ago
  The better option to understand how comma's openpilot works is to go to youtube and look up openpilot videos in action. What they are selling is an ARM board + cameras + CAN bus adapters for various vehicles. The stock software engages lane centering and longitudinal (gas/brake IF supported) and will keep the car lane centered. For highway driving, it's a huge quality of life improvement.
foobiekr 4y ago
The comma.ai guys appear to have pivoted to the huge Anybots market… Seems like a very strange choice.
- ushakov 4y ago
  context: https://www.commabody.com https://www.commabody.com personally, i don't think this is a "strange choice" for a company making self-driving vehicles more like an attempt to try to expand into other markets
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    Generally people expand into other markets when they have some viable product in one.
- robocat 4y ago
  https://blog.comma.ai/commabody/ https://blog.comma.ai/commabody/ The comma body is the first “intermediary” for the new mission. It’s also the pathway to supporting all cars that a human can drive. The endgame of comma isn’t a box that sits on your windshield, it’s a robot person that gets in the driver’s seat. And it will be able to do a lot more than drive. Appears to me to be a distracting pivot. Especially given the “Stay Focused on the Mission” statement in the part 1 article (which are worse examples, but still I think relevant).
  - georgehotz 4y ago
    Supporting the body allows us to find bugs in openpilot that wouldn't be easy to find in cars. For example, cars barely pitch and roll, so if you have something subtly off there, it's a lot easier to spot on the body. The body is also forcing us to reduce latency on things like the cameras and IMUs; this applies to the cars, just less obviously since cars change direction slower. The mission is self driving, and while we believe it's solvable without the full solution to AI, having the body forces us to stay on a viable AI track and not write hacks. See http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html I wouldn't say it's on the level of a PR stunt giving supplies to elementary school students...
ushakov 4y ago
> This as a mission statement makes no sense isn't that the case for like 90% of SV companies? these "mission statements" are so opaque you can't tell what actual product is often this is used as a marketing catch-phrase to attract hires, eg. "our company has a purpose (other companies don't)"
jti107 4y ago
i wonder if they think they can continue growing the self driving part with this approach. you will get the hacker types, but dont see this going mainstream. the way they get around regulators, is they are selling the hardware and the users are responsible for downloading and compiling the software. they support alot of cars but they are utilizing vehicle sensors off the can bus and adas vehicle commands. if the manufacturer decides to encrypt or restrict this then the approach wouldnt work.
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  The question is, would it be a crime to build hardware that circumvents the encryption/restrictions. If not, they can keep going.
- georgehotz 4y ago
  There's already 20 million supported cars on the road, that number is increasing year over year, and the derivative of that number is increasing year over year. Why would we worry about this?
  - cabyn 4y ago
    Is there a reason Ford isn't supported yet? Not enough sensors? Are they coming soon?
    - georgehotz 4y ago
      Ford has two issues: 1. Older cars have a lockout on steering after 10 seconds baked into the EPS firmware. 2. While newer cars don't have this lockout, adaptive cruise control (ACC) is only on high trims. Therefore low trims lack radar and (possibly) continuous duty brake controllers. It should be better in a year or two when ACC is standard on Ford. ACC is standard on Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Stellantis, and Subaru, hence that's where the effort goes.
      - cabyn 4y ago
        Makes sense, thanks!
bko 4y ago
I love the idea of Comma. It makes a lot of sense to have an after-market instrument to drive your car. There's no reason you have to re-build a car. You can probably get very far with just a few sensors and connecting to existing car controls. Humans drive perfectly well without lidar or a large number of cameras, so a bot should be able to as well. You can tell how full of shit a company is by the number of tangential things in their mission statement. If they want self driving, and all electric, and made from recycled parts, and give back 2% to the environment, they're prob full of it. Comma is taking an incremental approach which I like. Most driving is done on long monotonous roads going straight. If you can eliminate that portion, you'd add huge value. The other cool thing is that its completely open-source (except for code used to train the models). You can install it on your own device and run it, or fork it. I read a high percentage of users use custom forks of the software. They also have a discord where you can talk to the engineers and people working there if you have any issues or questions. Imagine calling someone from Toyota and just being connected to a auto-engineer? There's a lot to like about Comma. There are few businesses out there with this mindset. I hope other companies take their lead and think outside the box and stop worrying about the next round and just get some hackers together and build something people want.
- giobox 4y ago
  To preface this complaint, I'm generally bullish on self driving and think it will be solved to a reasonable standard in not too many years. With that said, even if this solution drove flawlessly I'm not so sure I like idea of cars being driven by an optical system that is attached to the windshield with suction cups. Much like we already mandate things like car lights cannot be on a moving piece of body work in the USA (to ensure lights visible even when boot or trunk open), I wonder if we should ensure that the critical sensors for self driving are hard mounted to the car securely? There is inevitably going to be occasions this falls off mid-drive - these suction cups are rarely perfect in my experience. I've always wondered if CarPlay/AndroidAuto one day might somehow just reuse existing sensor suites on vehicles to provide self driving - this would let the cellphone (which increasingly has ML acceleration hardware anyway) still be responsible for the driving with cameras that won't fall off.
  - 4y ago
shadycuz 4y ago
I'm really sad a company like Lucid didn't partner with comma to take on Tesla.
- georgehotz 4y ago
  No need to partner, comma doesn't offer that. The code is open source, they can just run it. They still can (and probably should from what I've heard about DreamDrive). The port to their hardware shouldn't be hard.
  - ljk1337 4y ago
    I follow you a long time, 10+ years, you really need to change your view of business people, start hiring more.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    > No need to partner, comma doesn't offer that is there a reason why you don't want offer that?
    - kjksf 4y ago
      I'm not Hotz but he I've watched a bunch of his interviews and the basic problem is that there are no buyers for "no bullshit technology". Pretty much every car maker (GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, VW) has already invested in at least one self-driving company. All those self-driving companies have the same technical plan and business strategy: lidar, high-precision maps, it has to be level 4 or nothing at all. They're also decent at selling that plan via powerpoint, tech demos and test deployments. I think at least 2 years ago Zoox gave a demo to a tech journalist (who produced a slick YouTube video out of it) and you would think that the technology is almost ready to go. More than a year ago MobileEye CEO gave a talk at a mobile conference and showed a video of a car impressively navigating busy streets of Jerusalem. You would think that the technology is almost ready to go. Comma, like Tesla, has "no lidars, no maps, ship intermediary products and use real data from real drivers to improve the technology, cheaply". To me it's an obviously winning strategy. To 99% or car CEOs it apparently isn't. Therefore they are not in the market for comma and won't be until it becomes obvious that their approach is failing and comma's approach is winning. So his position is more a sober assessment of lack of clue in major car maker execs and he decided that instead of playing the game of power point and pretend for the unlikely event of a car maker buying from them, he'll focus 100% on better engineering and winning in the long term by having obviously better product.
brrrrrm 4y ago
> comma is a 13 person company. We are ruthless about hiring the best and obsessed with minimizing complexity. How many is it now? Are you hiring?
- georgehotz 4y ago
  We are about 30, and about to move into a new 20k sq ft office with production and a datacenter on site. Yes!: https://comma.ai/jobs https://comma.ai/jobs And one more: https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1548030295340769280 https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1548030295340769280
  - shadycuz 4y ago
    Can you put me in touch with who runs your Jenkins setup? I just want to talk shop. https://twitter.com/shady_cuz/status/1547434211841347586 https://twitter.com/shady_cuz/status/1547434211841347586
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    How are you guys able to beat out multi million comp offers from the FAANGs? Huge stock grants?
    - georgehotz 4y ago
      Do you want to throw your life away selling ads? Or do you want to build open source software and solve self driving cars?
      - serialdev 4y ago
        I see the appeal. But I gotta say to constraint yourself to only California or Rotterdam is kind of missing that hacker vibe that cares about results and content. Not just hype.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
sjcoles 4y ago
Yet on the official Discord just as of a few days ago he was begging for sales and pitching for people start reselling the devices. George is bright but not a stable leader. Every month it's some new scheme or feature that will "sell 10x the units!" No, it won't, not with the lack of support and poor attitude from Comma. If George wants to sell 10x the units it must be a consumer device and treated by Comma as one.
- ushakov 4y ago
  no wonder given George's attitude against business people in his own words (from Part 2): > I’d say that 95% of people I met in the hacker world were good people; only 5% bad. The business world has this flipped. To get ahead in the hacker world you need skills. To get ahead in the business world you need psychopathy. maybe he needs to be more open and not let his negative feelings about business people worsen his business
  - anton_ai 4y ago
    It is not easy to hire a business leader in the AI sector that knows something about AI. And here is not even the "easy" AI, we are talking about autonomous driving that is like the edge of innovation in AI using computer vision and reinforcement learning. It is hard to find technical people that knows RL, it is much easier for the funder to get better in the business side.
    - ushakov 4y ago
      this might all be true, but how are you going to hire any business people anyways, if you have a predisposition that "95% of business people are bad and the only good one's are psychopaths"
      - kjksf 4y ago
        That's not what he said. Slightly re-phrasing, he said: "95% business people are bad (at helping companies achieve their goals) and 5% are good. The 95% succeed at keeping a job by being psychopaths". I wouldn't fixate on the word "psychopath". He's not talking about serial killers, just general sleaziness and advancing careers not by being good at their jobs but, say, playing office politics well. For a concrete example, let's consider that Zoox tweet about organizing Hispanic something event. It took at least a few people to do it. Someone had to conceive the idea, there had to be a meeting or two discussing it, some exec had to approve it, someone had to execute it and Zoox paid for it, directly for the event and indirectly for the salaries of the people involved. How much all this activity contributed to Zoox solving self-driving problem? Zero. Nada. Did it help justify the continuing employment of the people doing it? Yes. Maybe they even got a promotion for going "above and beyond" their duties. There's an argument that those people are more like parasites, draining the host company of funds, time and attention, advancing their own careers at the expense of Zoox. For context: this happened 3 years ago. Zoox still hasn't made a single dollar selling a product. They still hasn't solved self driving. They got acqui-hired by Amazon for less money that they raised which means that all employees that likely worked there for less money and stock options ended up working there for just less money.
metadat 4y ago
Don't miss part 2: https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
- petters 4y ago
  From part 2: > Nobody will have cars without a safety driver in cities anytime soon. Did not take that long.
  - georgehotz 4y ago
    The safety driver isn't in the car physically, they "work remotely" https://www.wired.com/story/cruises-robot-car-outages/ https://www.wired.com/story/cruises-robot-car-outages/
rvz 4y ago
Comma is still one of the rare startups I've seen that are able to enter into this fierce assisted driving systems market without the hype, lies and deception and have an actual working product, making money with low head count. That's how you do it. Unlike Tesla's FSD (Fools Self Driving) contraption that is getting so much hype for it not working at night and still cannot detect the driver's attention properly. Not only they finally admitted that they needed an eye tracking driver monitoring system, that still doesn't even work either. The FSD / Autopilot delusion created and boosted by Tesla was enough for the regulators to investigate this broken system. I don't see any of this in Comma.
- kjksf 4y ago
  Your up for a dose of cognitive dissonance. Hotz doesn't share your Tesla hate. He said numerous times, publicly, that Tesla will most likely win self driving. He doesn't think FSD is Fools Self Driving. He thinks FSD is ahead of openpilot. Hotz positions comma.ai as Android to Tesla's iOS i.e. a solution that is a little bit later and a little worse than FSD but open to all and better than 3rd or 4th best proprietary solution like cruise or waymo.
  - rvz 4y ago
    > Hotz doesn't share your Tesla hate. I hope you have realised that it is both autopilot and especially 'FSD' which is the problem that needs to be investigated (which it currently is) and each time it has proven not only to be unsafe, but a deceptively advertised product and at most, a dangerous scam. So where did I say I hated all of Tesla Inc. again? > He said numerous times, publicly, that Tesla will most likely win self driving. He doesn't think FSD is Fools Self Driving. He thinks FSD is ahead of openpilot. He is entitled to his own opinions. I believe that unless Tesla complies with the many regulators around the problems I have already highlighted, it is still considered 'Fools Self Driving'. There is too much evidence to list here for the case for more regulations on this. Anything that is going to 'likely win self driving' must comply with strict regulations and standards in both advertising, safety and the actual functionality. Both Tesla's autopilot and FSD with its repeated safety issues and most critically, the 'driver monitoring system' (DMS) for detecting attentiveness and eyes on the road was at first using the wheel which that has shown to be beyond unsafe and easily bypassed by its users. Comma is a great example of a proper (DMS) with Level 3 autopilot capabilities which that has eye-tracking with night vision. Perhaps that's why Tesla had to learn from them for improving their DMS after woefully defending using the wheel for DMS and denying that they needed eye-tracking. So one of them detects if you are using the product and requiring the driver to have their eyes on the road at all times, whereas the other will not work at all, especially at the dangerous time to drive; which is at night.
filmgirlcw 4y ago
Should have [2019] in the title.
dqpb 4y ago
I had no idea that so many car models have ports for controlling steering.
zdiscov 4y ago
Really wish George is successful with comma. Fantastic concept and one of the sharpest brains to tackle this problem. Love his "power to the people" approach with this, in a world where one can never even truly own one's own devices anymore.
dqpb 4y ago
> Our average user uses the hardware for 18 months Why do they stop using it?
- kjksf 4y ago
  I think the implication is more than they upgrade to a newer version of the hardware. Not that they stop using it.
jacquesm 4y ago
100x? Amateur. $7 to $1m. (Personal record, unlikely to ever be broken (by me)).
borissk 4y ago
In some markets ride sharing is very profitable. An accountant, who's my parents family friend used to work for Uber in UK before retiring. According to her just London generated 12 to 15 million pounds profit for Uber per month.
groby_b 4y ago
Given that it's a 2019 post, and there's lots of horn-tooting about 100x/1000x engineers going on, time for a reality check: How's comma.ai doing? Based on the meagre data publicly available, <$5M revenue, $16M funding rounds, 30 employees. It's not very 100x, is it? I don't debate they're doing interesting things, but the model of "overpromise and underdeliver" is pretty much exactly the same other startups follow, just with larger funding rounds.
pedalpete 4y ago
I'd love to use Comma, but I'm in Australia (other side of the road), and isn't compatible with my car :(
t_mann 4y ago
That post is 3 years old, the company is almost twice as old now as it was then, how are they doing today? But it's a good peak into the mind of GH - not the cosiest of people to hang out with perhaps, considering how intent he is on bashing competitors, but also a really good hacker. I'm kinda shocked he didn't raise more than 8.1m, way more has been spent on less promising minds, especially during the heydays of the late 2010's.

127 points by allenleee 4y ago

Part 2: https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/

I need to switch my car so that I could buy a comma.ai and use it at its full potential (my Mazda's steering motor isn't powerful enough)

learndeeply 4y ago

Article was posted in 2019, in case other people missed it like I did.

rootcage 4y ago

You mention that tesla and comma have similar technical infrastructure. Tesla is doing or has done many of the caveats you describe about other companies, can you dig deeper into Tesla as a competitor?

JoshCole 4y ago
What are the shared caveats you are thinking of? The caveats that stood out to me were that he mentions: lidar usage inflating costs, targeting ride sharing as path to profitability, and using VC money to fund non-mission goals prior to profitability. Tesla doesn't use lidar, is already profitable without having targeted ride sharing as the path to that, and is already default alive and not dependent on VC money.
kjksf 4y ago
The big architectural (and business strategy) difference between Tesla and more or less everyone else (Waymo, Cruise, Apple...) is: - doesn't rely on lidar - doesn't rely on pre-mapping areas - ships intermediary products vs. big bang approach of "100% self-driving or nothing" - makes money on those intermediary products (vs. loosing money until the big bang) - while everyone is using Deep Learning for solving the problem, I believe Tesla is betting on DL / AI harder than most On those big points Comma is exactly like Tesla and unlike almost everyone else. I'm not sure which caveats you meant.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "big bang approach". There isn't a single company whose goal is 100% or nothing. Not cruise, nor waymo, nor anyone else. That's why they have things like remote assistance and incremental rollouts. Similarly, waymo and cruise are both making [small amounts of] money on their "intermediary" robotaxis right now.
  - JoshCole 4y ago
    http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html is contextually relevant to the point you don't understand the meaning of. They are operating in an abstracted representation of the situation related to what Paul Graham talks about. In that abstracted representation you get some not so obvious corollaries: a deep relationship between confidence and the reasonableness of default alive versus default dead strategy.

agumonkey 4y ago

any actual user still on this project ? i wonder if it's stable or improving

md2020 4y ago
It is stable and is improving. I have a Comma 3 in my car and use it almost every time I drive. The team is also very active in the company’s Discord.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Interesting, hotz really went into stealth mode since a few years back. Much better I guess.
- raylad 4y ago
  One major reason I've hesitated to buy a Comma is because it seems that it won't apply enough steering force in (most? any?) cars to reliably be able to navigate any turn, and it also won't let you know in advance if it can't do that. So in the middle of a turn it may just not be able to steer enough and you have to suddenly take over. I know you have to be aware and be ready to take over in any case (and when I've driven a Tesla it's tried to kill me at least a couple of times every day), but for some reason I really want anything I buy for driver assistance to be able to apply enough force for any turn. Am I mistaken about that or what's your experience?

twelve40 4y ago

i go to their website comma.ai and for the life of me cannot figure out what this is and what they are asking $2000 from me for. "Chill driving"?? Maybe a bit of explanation would help? or is it even active anymore?

bm-rf 4y ago
I think the tricky part for them is that the hardware and the software need to be marketed differently in order for this to be legal. Out of the box, the comma 3 only functions as a dash cam. You need to personally load openpilot onto it. I guess it's not possible (or wise) to sell a self driving kit currently, but selling a dash cam that just so happens to work really well with openpilot is.
- OJFord 4y ago
  I'm surprised the law's developed enough for that, I'd think it would be on the (non-)driver either way.
itchyouch 4y ago
The better option to understand how comma's openpilot works is to go to youtube and look up openpilot videos in action. What they are selling is an ARM board + cameras + CAN bus adapters for various vehicles. The stock software engages lane centering and longitudinal (gas/brake IF supported) and will keep the car lane centered. For highway driving, it's a huge quality of life improvement.

foobiekr 4y ago

The comma.ai guys appear to have pivoted to the huge Anybots market… Seems like a very strange choice.

ushakov 4y ago
context: https://www.commabody.com https://www.commabody.com personally, i don't think this is a "strange choice" for a company making self-driving vehicles more like an attempt to try to expand into other markets
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Generally people expand into other markets when they have some viable product in one.
robocat 4y ago
https://blog.comma.ai/commabody/ https://blog.comma.ai/commabody/ The comma body is the first “intermediary” for the new mission. It’s also the pathway to supporting all cars that a human can drive. The endgame of comma isn’t a box that sits on your windshield, it’s a robot person that gets in the driver’s seat. And it will be able to do a lot more than drive. Appears to me to be a distracting pivot. Especially given the “Stay Focused on the Mission” statement in the part 1 article (which are worse examples, but still I think relevant).
- georgehotz 4y ago
  Supporting the body allows us to find bugs in openpilot that wouldn't be easy to find in cars. For example, cars barely pitch and roll, so if you have something subtly off there, it's a lot easier to spot on the body. The body is also forcing us to reduce latency on things like the cameras and IMUs; this applies to the cars, just less obviously since cars change direction slower. The mission is self driving, and while we believe it's solvable without the full solution to AI, having the body forces us to stay on a viable AI track and not write hacks. See http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html I wouldn't say it's on the level of a PR stunt giving supplies to elementary school students...

ushakov 4y ago

> This as a mission statement makes no sense isn't that the case for like 90% of SV companies? these "mission statements" are so opaque you can't tell what actual product is often this is used as a marketing catch-phrase to attract hires, eg. "our company has a purpose (other companies don't)"

jti107 4y ago

i wonder if they think they can continue growing the self driving part with this approach. you will get the hacker types, but dont see this going mainstream. the way they get around regulators, is they are selling the hardware and the users are responsible for downloading and compiling the software. they support alot of cars but they are utilizing vehicle sensors off the can bus and adas vehicle commands. if the manufacturer decides to encrypt or restrict this then the approach wouldnt work.

j0hnyl 4y ago
The question is, would it be a crime to build hardware that circumvents the encryption/restrictions. If not, they can keep going.
georgehotz 4y ago
There's already 20 million supported cars on the road, that number is increasing year over year, and the derivative of that number is increasing year over year. Why would we worry about this?
- cabyn 4y ago
  Is there a reason Ford isn't supported yet? Not enough sensors? Are they coming soon?
  - georgehotz 4y ago
    Ford has two issues: 1. Older cars have a lockout on steering after 10 seconds baked into the EPS firmware. 2. While newer cars don't have this lockout, adaptive cruise control (ACC) is only on high trims. Therefore low trims lack radar and (possibly) continuous duty brake controllers. It should be better in a year or two when ACC is standard on Ford. ACC is standard on Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Stellantis, and Subaru, hence that's where the effort goes.
    - cabyn 4y ago
      Makes sense, thanks!

bko 4y ago

I love the idea of Comma. It makes a lot of sense to have an after-market instrument to drive your car. There's no reason you have to re-build a car. You can probably get very far with just a few sensors and connecting to existing car controls. Humans drive perfectly well without lidar or a large number of cameras, so a bot should be able to as well. You can tell how full of shit a company is by the number of tangential things in their mission statement. If they want self driving, and all electric, and made from recycled parts, and give back 2% to the environment, they're prob full of it. Comma is taking an incremental approach which I like. Most driving is done on long monotonous roads going straight. If you can eliminate that portion, you'd add huge value. The other cool thing is that its completely open-source (except for code used to train the models). You can install it on your own device and run it, or fork it. I read a high percentage of users use custom forks of the software. They also have a discord where you can talk to the engineers and people working there if you have any issues or questions. Imagine calling someone from Toyota and just being connected to a auto-engineer? There's a lot to like about Comma. There are few businesses out there with this mindset. I hope other companies take their lead and think outside the box and stop worrying about the next round and just get some hackers together and build something people want.

giobox 4y ago
To preface this complaint, I'm generally bullish on self driving and think it will be solved to a reasonable standard in not too many years. With that said, even if this solution drove flawlessly I'm not so sure I like idea of cars being driven by an optical system that is attached to the windshield with suction cups. Much like we already mandate things like car lights cannot be on a moving piece of body work in the USA (to ensure lights visible even when boot or trunk open), I wonder if we should ensure that the critical sensors for self driving are hard mounted to the car securely? There is inevitably going to be occasions this falls off mid-drive - these suction cups are rarely perfect in my experience. I've always wondered if CarPlay/AndroidAuto one day might somehow just reuse existing sensor suites on vehicles to provide self driving - this would let the cellphone (which increasingly has ML acceleration hardware anyway) still be responsible for the driving with cameras that won't fall off.
- 4y ago

shadycuz 4y ago

I'm really sad a company like Lucid didn't partner with comma to take on Tesla.

georgehotz 4y ago
No need to partner, comma doesn't offer that. The code is open source, they can just run it. They still can (and probably should from what I've heard about DreamDrive). The port to their hardware shouldn't be hard.
- ljk1337 4y ago
  I follow you a long time, 10+ years, you really need to change your view of business people, start hiring more.
- ushakov 4y ago
  > No need to partner, comma doesn't offer that is there a reason why you don't want offer that?
  - kjksf 4y ago
    I'm not Hotz but he I've watched a bunch of his interviews and the basic problem is that there are no buyers for "no bullshit technology". Pretty much every car maker (GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, VW) has already invested in at least one self-driving company. All those self-driving companies have the same technical plan and business strategy: lidar, high-precision maps, it has to be level 4 or nothing at all. They're also decent at selling that plan via powerpoint, tech demos and test deployments. I think at least 2 years ago Zoox gave a demo to a tech journalist (who produced a slick YouTube video out of it) and you would think that the technology is almost ready to go. More than a year ago MobileEye CEO gave a talk at a mobile conference and showed a video of a car impressively navigating busy streets of Jerusalem. You would think that the technology is almost ready to go. Comma, like Tesla, has "no lidars, no maps, ship intermediary products and use real data from real drivers to improve the technology, cheaply". To me it's an obviously winning strategy. To 99% or car CEOs it apparently isn't. Therefore they are not in the market for comma and won't be until it becomes obvious that their approach is failing and comma's approach is winning. So his position is more a sober assessment of lack of clue in major car maker execs and he decided that instead of playing the game of power point and pretend for the unlikely event of a car maker buying from them, he'll focus 100% on better engineering and winning in the long term by having obviously better product.

brrrrrm 4y ago

> comma is a 13 person company. We are ruthless about hiring the best and obsessed with minimizing complexity. How many is it now? Are you hiring?

georgehotz 4y ago
We are about 30, and about to move into a new 20k sq ft office with production and a datacenter on site. Yes!: https://comma.ai/jobs https://comma.ai/jobs And one more: https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1548030295340769280 https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1548030295340769280
- shadycuz 4y ago
  Can you put me in touch with who runs your Jenkins setup? I just want to talk shop. https://twitter.com/shady_cuz/status/1547434211841347586 https://twitter.com/shady_cuz/status/1547434211841347586
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  How are you guys able to beat out multi million comp offers from the FAANGs? Huge stock grants?
  - georgehotz 4y ago
    Do you want to throw your life away selling ads? Or do you want to build open source software and solve self driving cars?
    - serialdev 4y ago
      I see the appeal. But I gotta say to constraint yourself to only California or Rotterdam is kind of missing that hacker vibe that cares about results and content. Not just hype.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

sjcoles 4y ago

Yet on the official Discord just as of a few days ago he was begging for sales and pitching for people start reselling the devices. George is bright but not a stable leader. Every month it's some new scheme or feature that will "sell 10x the units!" No, it won't, not with the lack of support and poor attitude from Comma. If George wants to sell 10x the units it must be a consumer device and treated by Comma as one.

ushakov 4y ago
no wonder given George's attitude against business people in his own words (from Part 2): > I’d say that 95% of people I met in the hacker world were good people; only 5% bad. The business world has this flipped. To get ahead in the hacker world you need skills. To get ahead in the business world you need psychopathy. maybe he needs to be more open and not let his negative feelings about business people worsen his business
- anton_ai 4y ago
  It is not easy to hire a business leader in the AI sector that knows something about AI. And here is not even the "easy" AI, we are talking about autonomous driving that is like the edge of innovation in AI using computer vision and reinforcement learning. It is hard to find technical people that knows RL, it is much easier for the funder to get better in the business side.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    this might all be true, but how are you going to hire any business people anyways, if you have a predisposition that "95% of business people are bad and the only good one's are psychopaths"
    - kjksf 4y ago
      That's not what he said. Slightly re-phrasing, he said: "95% business people are bad (at helping companies achieve their goals) and 5% are good. The 95% succeed at keeping a job by being psychopaths". I wouldn't fixate on the word "psychopath". He's not talking about serial killers, just general sleaziness and advancing careers not by being good at their jobs but, say, playing office politics well. For a concrete example, let's consider that Zoox tweet about organizing Hispanic something event. It took at least a few people to do it. Someone had to conceive the idea, there had to be a meeting or two discussing it, some exec had to approve it, someone had to execute it and Zoox paid for it, directly for the event and indirectly for the salaries of the people involved. How much all this activity contributed to Zoox solving self-driving problem? Zero. Nada. Did it help justify the continuing employment of the people doing it? Yes. Maybe they even got a promotion for going "above and beyond" their duties. There's an argument that those people are more like parasites, draining the host company of funds, time and attention, advancing their own careers at the expense of Zoox. For context: this happened 3 years ago. Zoox still hasn't made a single dollar selling a product. They still hasn't solved self driving. They got acqui-hired by Amazon for less money that they raised which means that all employees that likely worked there for less money and stock options ended up working there for just less money.

metadat 4y ago

Don't miss part 2: https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/

petters 4y ago
From part 2: > Nobody will have cars without a safety driver in cities anytime soon. Did not take that long.
- georgehotz 4y ago
  The safety driver isn't in the car physically, they "work remotely" https://www.wired.com/story/cruises-robot-car-outages/ https://www.wired.com/story/cruises-robot-car-outages/

rvz 4y ago

Comma is still one of the rare startups I've seen that are able to enter into this fierce assisted driving systems market without the hype, lies and deception and have an actual working product, making money with low head count. That's how you do it. Unlike Tesla's FSD (Fools Self Driving) contraption that is getting so much hype for it not working at night and still cannot detect the driver's attention properly. Not only they finally admitted that they needed an eye tracking driver monitoring system, that still doesn't even work either. The FSD / Autopilot delusion created and boosted by Tesla was enough for the regulators to investigate this broken system. I don't see any of this in Comma.

kjksf 4y ago
Your up for a dose of cognitive dissonance. Hotz doesn't share your Tesla hate. He said numerous times, publicly, that Tesla will most likely win self driving. He doesn't think FSD is Fools Self Driving. He thinks FSD is ahead of openpilot. Hotz positions comma.ai as Android to Tesla's iOS i.e. a solution that is a little bit later and a little worse than FSD but open to all and better than 3rd or 4th best proprietary solution like cruise or waymo.
- rvz 4y ago
  > Hotz doesn't share your Tesla hate. I hope you have realised that it is both autopilot and especially 'FSD' which is the problem that needs to be investigated (which it currently is) and each time it has proven not only to be unsafe, but a deceptively advertised product and at most, a dangerous scam. So where did I say I hated all of Tesla Inc. again? > He said numerous times, publicly, that Tesla will most likely win self driving. He doesn't think FSD is Fools Self Driving. He thinks FSD is ahead of openpilot. He is entitled to his own opinions. I believe that unless Tesla complies with the many regulators around the problems I have already highlighted, it is still considered 'Fools Self Driving'. There is too much evidence to list here for the case for more regulations on this. Anything that is going to 'likely win self driving' must comply with strict regulations and standards in both advertising, safety and the actual functionality. Both Tesla's autopilot and FSD with its repeated safety issues and most critically, the 'driver monitoring system' (DMS) for detecting attentiveness and eyes on the road was at first using the wheel which that has shown to be beyond unsafe and easily bypassed by its users. Comma is a great example of a proper (DMS) with Level 3 autopilot capabilities which that has eye-tracking with night vision. Perhaps that's why Tesla had to learn from them for improving their DMS after woefully defending using the wheel for DMS and denying that they needed eye-tracking. So one of them detects if you are using the product and requiring the driver to have their eyes on the road at all times, whereas the other will not work at all, especially at the dangerous time to drive; which is at night.

filmgirlcw 4y ago

Should have [2019] in the title.

dqpb 4y ago

I had no idea that so many car models have ports for controlling steering.

zdiscov 4y ago

Really wish George is successful with comma. Fantastic concept and one of the sharpest brains to tackle this problem. Love his "power to the people" approach with this, in a world where one can never even truly own one's own devices anymore.

dqpb 4y ago

> Our average user uses the hardware for 18 months Why do they stop using it?

kjksf 4y ago
I think the implication is more than they upgrade to a newer version of the hardware. Not that they stop using it.

jacquesm 4y ago

100x? Amateur. $7 to $1m. (Personal record, unlikely to ever be broken (by me)).

borissk 4y ago

In some markets ride sharing is very profitable. An accountant, who's my parents family friend used to work for Uber in UK before retiring. According to her just London generated 12 to 15 million pounds profit for Uber per month.

groby_b 4y ago

Given that it's a 2019 post, and there's lots of horn-tooting about 100x/1000x engineers going on, time for a reality check: How's comma.ai doing? Based on the meagre data publicly available, <$5M revenue, $16M funding rounds, 30 employees. It's not very 100x, is it? I don't debate they're doing interesting things, but the model of "overpromise and underdeliver" is pretty much exactly the same other startups follow, just with larger funding rounds.

pedalpete 4y ago

I'd love to use Comma, but I'm in Australia (other side of the road), and isn't compatible with my car :(

t_mann 4y ago

That post is 3 years old, the company is almost twice as old now as it was then, how are they doing today? But it's a good peak into the mind of GH - not the cosiest of people to hang out with perhaps, considering how intent he is on bashing competitors, but also a really good hacker. I'm kinda shocked he didn't raise more than 8.1m, way more has been spent on less promising minds, especially during the heydays of the late 2010's.