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As a robotics engineer (though I don’t work on AI systems) I was bullish on Tesla’s architecture for a long time. I’ve watched all their presentations. Their hy

As a robotics engineer (though I don’t work on AI systems) I was bullish on Tesla’s architecture for a long time. I’ve watched all their presentations. Their hydra network. Their massive custom AI chip. I really thought they had a chance at making it all work. But the long tail is killing them. They’re walking back their claims for fully autonomous operation. Andrej Karpathy (their AI lead) left. Musk is distracted and showing that he doesn’t have all the technical chops we thought he did (if reports from inside twitter are to be believed). It feels like the company is all promises and no delivery now. Many have been saying this for years, but I really thought they were going to pull it off. Now I’m beginning to feel that they’re not organized appropriately to do it. You just can’t have a single guy who is all ego running a project as complex as this and find success. I think of how they must be doing things at Waymo or Cruise and they’re going to have a team of competent people in charge who don’t make rash decisions on major architectural issues. And given the scope of this problem I’m really starting to believe that’s what’s needed to make this work. There’s just no silver bullet. I’m really questioning what led me to believe in all this in the first place.

tleilaxu 4y ago
> But the long tail is killing them. I imagine their engineers have said they’re “90% finished” once or twice in the last few years… Always a red flag!
- galleywest200 4y ago
  To be fair the last 10% of any project is generally 90% of the work. So saying you are 90% done yet being far off is truthful, in a sense.
  - bagels 4y ago
    Is this a Zeno's paradox, where you can never actually finish?
    - dieselgate 4y ago
      Have heard a twist/joke on this where an engineer says something like "i'll never get all the way there but close enough for it to work"
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    Its dishonest to not scale by effort required when reporting project progress.
  - mrcwinn 4y ago
    As a leader of software teams at various points of my career, I have to completely reject this notion. In a poorly managed project, yes, the last 10% of a project is 90% of the work. A healthy project puts 90% of the work at the front: the work of planning, narrowing scope, thinking creatively about what could go wrong, leaving oneself off-ramps in case of unexpected situations. The speed or cadence of a project should only increase as you near release; momentum should build. There should be a natural period of "dust settling" before production, rather than scrambling to pull the system into a healthy state. If an engineer repeatedly says they're "close," but cannot quantify such a statement, I find they're (generally speaking) completely full of it. Perhaps Tesla's situation is unique (or perhaps not). Musk has repeatedly said it's difficult to gauge completion date because no one has built this software before, so there is no benchmark. Having just sold my Tesla in favor of a competitor, I suppose I won't be there for the release anyway!
    - kolbe 4y ago
      I think it depends on the project. 90% of SWEs are using pre-packaged databases, analytics, logging, APIs and whatnot. There is no 10% or 1% tail bogging them down because they're just configuring tools. But if you're in the business of innovation, it's really hard to know what lies in the darkness ahead, and it it very common to attack the easiest parts first, and what you thought was a 1% that would take up half the time is a 1% that cannot be completed ever.
      - paulcole 4y ago
        I think the point is that if that final 1% is essential to the project then the project was poorly planned (like the comment you replied to said). Why spend untold time tinkering on the fun easy stuff ignoring a 1% that could kill the whole thing? If that 1% isn’t essential then you should just not do it — and if you don’t make that decision then the project is also poorly planned.
        kolbe 4y ago
        I think if every single great discovery in the course of humanity had to have been "well planned," they would have never happened. Like I said, most of the "disruption" and "innovation" happening in the startup ecosystem is far from. And projects of that scale involve little to no unknowns so long as a properly experienced team is attacking them. But when you're talking about AV or fusion power (or even much smaller discoveries that sit on the vanguard of human knowledge), it requires the kind of leap into the unknown that all great discoveries have necessitated.
  - TomSwirly 4y ago
    > To be fair the last 10% of any project is generally 90% of the work. No, that means a pathologically badly planned project. If some part of your estimates are off by an order of magnitude, you need to learn to do a lot better at estimation.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
The thing is human intelligence shines in the long tail and stochastic parrots thrash and die there.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  This is absolutely correct and I'm not sure why people are downvoting you, unless they're not familiar with the stochastic parrots paper. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    > I'm not sure why people are downvoting you I am not sure too. I also want AGI to happen but we need to acknowledge the limitations of current formalisms and I think people are married to formalisms.
PinguTS 4y ago
Everybody got bullish on this when Google first publicly presented their autonomous car and everybody from IT said: 10 years from now. Except all the automotive people said: Nay, way to complex to solve. The automotive guys worked since the 1960s/1970s on this. Yes it got boosted by the advances in AI, which where mainly driven by the now available computing power/memory. But AI and its limitation is known since the 1980s/1990s. I learned AI in hte mid 1990s in the university as part of my degree as an electrical engineer. Now, we are at a point where even the Waymo guys (former Google Car) admit, that the fully self driving car will be years away. It will take much more years then everybody expected. The cars the Waymo runs, are running in very dedicated areas, which are highly mapped. They still have problems with temporay obstacles, like road construction. They still have problems in unexpected weather situations. So it is, that even all the tech people who believed in the sayings from Elon, now realizes that its just vaporware.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  It's not vaporware, it's just taken significantly longer than expected. Tesla's solution looks more like vaporware because of how many times Musk has promised fully driverless operation -- sometimes even promising a cross country hands off trip -- within a year or two. Other companies have also had overly optimistic predictions, but generally not "we'll be able to go anywhere in the country with no intervention within the next year" level of extreme. Waymo's progress has been slow relative to "ten years" predictions, but they've also made steady progress, and it looks like it's continuing.
  - badwolf 4y ago
    Tesla is also selling "full self driving" as a feature, right now. Not "coming in a year or two" They are taking people's money for it right now, and have been for years.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - mikestew 4y ago
aglavine 4y ago
Isn´t what they have right now safer than human driving?
- slg 4y ago
  This is the type of question that will start arguments on both sides, but the truth is no one outside Tesla could possibly have the data to say one way or the other.
- xmprt 4y ago
  Safer than human driving isn't the bar that needs to be cleared. I consider myself a much safer driver than the average human (which also includes 70 year olds with driver's licenses) and I don't drive when I'm sleepy or drunk or even a little impaired. Even if the claim that it's "safer than human driving" is true, I would only ever use it if it was safer than my driving.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Fun fact: most people believe they're a safer than the average driver. Many people even believe this while driving drunk. Unless we start putting interlocks on all cars (which isn't entirely hypothetical[0]), they're just going to keep driving around drunk. Would you rather they drive drunk, or have an imperfect system that's better than drunk them, driving a car that also has an AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking) system? [0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/anti-drunk-driving-technology-mandated-infrastructure-bill/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/anti-drunk-driving-technolog...
    - archagon 4y ago
      Practically speaking, even if self-driving technology was widely available today, it would take decades for manual cars to get off the road.
    - TomSwirly 4y ago
      I know I am not as good as the average driver, simply because I have much less practice, but I make up for it by extreme vigilance and caution, and I've never been in any sort of accident or moving violation. I think the world would be a better place if most people believed they were bad drivers like I do, and were much more vigilant and less aggressive.
rcxdude 4y ago
Tesla's approach has always been the least credible of the self-driving companies: they seemed to belive that if you just iterate on driver assist enough you get self-driving, and they seemed to want to make the system work on far more constrained hardware than their competition (because they were for some reason aiming at selling direct to consumers, which is not a particularly good business strategy for self-driving. A cynic would suggest it was vaporware for marketing all along). Other groups working on the problem (especially Waymo) seemed to actually grok that this is by far the most complex safety-critical system ever envisioned and approached the problem accordingly (with a lot of caution, laying of groundwork, a plan to roll out the system gradually, and bulding the it from the ground up to work on its own, not as a driver assist).
- carlivar 4y ago
  When Tesla got rid of radar and switched to "vision only" I cynically assumed it was a way to compensate for supply chain issues rather than radar being as useless as Musk was saying. I still think this is a possibility.
  - rcxdude 4y ago
    It's also possible their radar was functionally useless: while it gave good range information it had poor angular resolution, a fact which seemed to contribute to Autopilot's issue with recognising stationary obstacles. it's worth keeping in mind that LIDAR gives much higher quality data than low-cost radar. (It also doesn't follow that if their radar was useless that vision alone would be good enough)
    - akerl_ 4y ago
      That might have made more sense to me if they hadn't followed it up by removing their ultrasonic sensors, which were functionally quite useful, since without them the car cannot see things at low speeds that are below the plane visible from the front-facing camera mounted opposite the rear view mirror.
    - WirelessGigabit 4y ago
JohnBooty 4y ago
Musk is distracted and showing that he doesn’t have all the technical chops we thought he did (if reports from inside twitter are to be believed) Who thought he had technical chops? I don't mean this as snarky or glib. But it was surprising to read. The rosiest take is that he's a Steve Jobs type as opposed to a Bill Gates type. A guy who assembles and rallies teams of engineers and designers around a singular vision and often manages to pull, push, or drag them across the finish line. I'm not a fan of Musk in particular, although I am also not demeaning this sort of CEO. The ability to form/lead/motivate teams that execute on this level doesn't exactly grow on trees. And it's all but impossible for a CEO to have deep, current "technical chops." It's just that I've never actually heard Musk credited with having technical chops.
- lexandstuff 4y ago
  Musk regularly repeats that he is an "engineer, not a businessman" This video edits together examples from various interviews: https://youtu.be/e7ez_WF40hY https://youtu.be/e7ez_WF40hY
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    Ah, okay. That explains some things. He's the one saying it, and I guess some folks bought into it and believed him.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sho_hn 4y ago
  > Who thought he had technical chops? Many, many people liked Musk, or called him more credible, for being the one CEO who also knows engineering. It also made him aspirational or a role model for many engineering types. It's a bit like when people mention that Angela Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry, it confers legitimacy in context. The difference, of course, is that Merkel also actually has her degree.

tleilaxu 4y ago

> But the long tail is killing them. I imagine their engineers have said they’re “90% finished” once or twice in the last few years… Always a red flag!

galleywest200 4y ago
To be fair the last 10% of any project is generally 90% of the work. So saying you are 90% done yet being far off is truthful, in a sense.
- bagels 4y ago
  Is this a Zeno's paradox, where you can never actually finish?
  - dieselgate 4y ago
    Have heard a twist/joke on this where an engineer says something like "i'll never get all the way there but close enough for it to work"
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Its dishonest to not scale by effort required when reporting project progress.
- mrcwinn 4y ago
  As a leader of software teams at various points of my career, I have to completely reject this notion. In a poorly managed project, yes, the last 10% of a project is 90% of the work. A healthy project puts 90% of the work at the front: the work of planning, narrowing scope, thinking creatively about what could go wrong, leaving oneself off-ramps in case of unexpected situations. The speed or cadence of a project should only increase as you near release; momentum should build. There should be a natural period of "dust settling" before production, rather than scrambling to pull the system into a healthy state. If an engineer repeatedly says they're "close," but cannot quantify such a statement, I find they're (generally speaking) completely full of it. Perhaps Tesla's situation is unique (or perhaps not). Musk has repeatedly said it's difficult to gauge completion date because no one has built this software before, so there is no benchmark. Having just sold my Tesla in favor of a competitor, I suppose I won't be there for the release anyway!
  - kolbe 4y ago
    I think it depends on the project. 90% of SWEs are using pre-packaged databases, analytics, logging, APIs and whatnot. There is no 10% or 1% tail bogging them down because they're just configuring tools. But if you're in the business of innovation, it's really hard to know what lies in the darkness ahead, and it it very common to attack the easiest parts first, and what you thought was a 1% that would take up half the time is a 1% that cannot be completed ever.
    - paulcole 4y ago
      I think the point is that if that final 1% is essential to the project then the project was poorly planned (like the comment you replied to said). Why spend untold time tinkering on the fun easy stuff ignoring a 1% that could kill the whole thing? If that 1% isn’t essential then you should just not do it — and if you don’t make that decision then the project is also poorly planned.
      - kolbe 4y ago
        I think if every single great discovery in the course of humanity had to have been "well planned," they would have never happened. Like I said, most of the "disruption" and "innovation" happening in the startup ecosystem is far from. And projects of that scale involve little to no unknowns so long as a properly experienced team is attacking them. But when you're talking about AV or fusion power (or even much smaller discoveries that sit on the vanguard of human knowledge), it requires the kind of leap into the unknown that all great discoveries have necessitated.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  > To be fair the last 10% of any project is generally 90% of the work. No, that means a pathologically badly planned project. If some part of your estimates are off by an order of magnitude, you need to learn to do a lot better at estimation.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago

The thing is human intelligence shines in the long tail and stochastic parrots thrash and die there.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
This is absolutely correct and I'm not sure why people are downvoting you, unless they're not familiar with the stochastic parrots paper. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  > I'm not sure why people are downvoting you I am not sure too. I also want AGI to happen but we need to acknowledge the limitations of current formalisms and I think people are married to formalisms.

PinguTS 4y ago

Everybody got bullish on this when Google first publicly presented their autonomous car and everybody from IT said: 10 years from now. Except all the automotive people said: Nay, way to complex to solve. The automotive guys worked since the 1960s/1970s on this. Yes it got boosted by the advances in AI, which where mainly driven by the now available computing power/memory. But AI and its limitation is known since the 1980s/1990s. I learned AI in hte mid 1990s in the university as part of my degree as an electrical engineer. Now, we are at a point where even the Waymo guys (former Google Car) admit, that the fully self driving car will be years away. It will take much more years then everybody expected. The cars the Waymo runs, are running in very dedicated areas, which are highly mapped. They still have problems with temporay obstacles, like road construction. They still have problems in unexpected weather situations. So it is, that even all the tech people who believed in the sayings from Elon, now realizes that its just vaporware.

TulliusCicero 4y ago
It's not vaporware, it's just taken significantly longer than expected. Tesla's solution looks more like vaporware because of how many times Musk has promised fully driverless operation -- sometimes even promising a cross country hands off trip -- within a year or two. Other companies have also had overly optimistic predictions, but generally not "we'll be able to go anywhere in the country with no intervention within the next year" level of extreme. Waymo's progress has been slow relative to "ten years" predictions, but they've also made steady progress, and it looks like it's continuing.
- badwolf 4y ago
  Tesla is also selling "full self driving" as a feature, right now. Not "coming in a year or two" They are taking people's money for it right now, and have been for years.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mikestew 4y ago

aglavine 4y ago

Isn´t what they have right now safer than human driving?

slg 4y ago
This is the type of question that will start arguments on both sides, but the truth is no one outside Tesla could possibly have the data to say one way or the other.
xmprt 4y ago
Safer than human driving isn't the bar that needs to be cleared. I consider myself a much safer driver than the average human (which also includes 70 year olds with driver's licenses) and I don't drive when I'm sleepy or drunk or even a little impaired. Even if the claim that it's "safer than human driving" is true, I would only ever use it if it was safer than my driving.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Fun fact: most people believe they're a safer than the average driver. Many people even believe this while driving drunk. Unless we start putting interlocks on all cars (which isn't entirely hypothetical[0]), they're just going to keep driving around drunk. Would you rather they drive drunk, or have an imperfect system that's better than drunk them, driving a car that also has an AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking) system? [0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/anti-drunk-driving-technology-mandated-infrastructure-bill/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/anti-drunk-driving-technolog...
  - archagon 4y ago
    Practically speaking, even if self-driving technology was widely available today, it would take decades for manual cars to get off the road.
  - TomSwirly 4y ago
    I know I am not as good as the average driver, simply because I have much less practice, but I make up for it by extreme vigilance and caution, and I've never been in any sort of accident or moving violation. I think the world would be a better place if most people believed they were bad drivers like I do, and were much more vigilant and less aggressive.

rcxdude 4y ago

Tesla's approach has always been the least credible of the self-driving companies: they seemed to belive that if you just iterate on driver assist enough you get self-driving, and they seemed to want to make the system work on far more constrained hardware than their competition (because they were for some reason aiming at selling direct to consumers, which is not a particularly good business strategy for self-driving. A cynic would suggest it was vaporware for marketing all along). Other groups working on the problem (especially Waymo) seemed to actually grok that this is by far the most complex safety-critical system ever envisioned and approached the problem accordingly (with a lot of caution, laying of groundwork, a plan to roll out the system gradually, and bulding the it from the ground up to work on its own, not as a driver assist).

carlivar 4y ago
When Tesla got rid of radar and switched to "vision only" I cynically assumed it was a way to compensate for supply chain issues rather than radar being as useless as Musk was saying. I still think this is a possibility.
- rcxdude 4y ago
  It's also possible their radar was functionally useless: while it gave good range information it had poor angular resolution, a fact which seemed to contribute to Autopilot's issue with recognising stationary obstacles. it's worth keeping in mind that LIDAR gives much higher quality data than low-cost radar. (It also doesn't follow that if their radar was useless that vision alone would be good enough)
  - akerl_ 4y ago
    That might have made more sense to me if they hadn't followed it up by removing their ultrasonic sensors, which were functionally quite useful, since without them the car cannot see things at low speeds that are below the plane visible from the front-facing camera mounted opposite the rear view mirror.
  - WirelessGigabit 4y ago

JohnBooty 4y ago

Musk is distracted and showing that he doesn’t have all the technical chops we thought he did (if reports from inside twitter are to be believed) Who thought he had technical chops? I don't mean this as snarky or glib. But it was surprising to read. The rosiest take is that he's a Steve Jobs type as opposed to a Bill Gates type. A guy who assembles and rallies teams of engineers and designers around a singular vision and often manages to pull, push, or drag them across the finish line. I'm not a fan of Musk in particular, although I am also not demeaning this sort of CEO. The ability to form/lead/motivate teams that execute on this level doesn't exactly grow on trees. And it's all but impossible for a CEO to have deep, current "technical chops." It's just that I've never actually heard Musk credited with having technical chops.

lexandstuff 4y ago
Musk regularly repeats that he is an "engineer, not a businessman" This video edits together examples from various interviews: https://youtu.be/e7ez_WF40hY https://youtu.be/e7ez_WF40hY
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Ah, okay. That explains some things. He's the one saying it, and I guess some folks bought into it and believed him.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sho_hn 4y ago
> Who thought he had technical chops? Many, many people liked Musk, or called him more credible, for being the one CEO who also knows engineering. It also made him aspirational or a role model for many engineering types. It's a bit like when people mention that Angela Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry, it confers legitimacy in context. The difference, of course, is that Merkel also actually has her degree.