Elon belittles lidar saying it is doomed and will never work yet Waymo and Cruise will probably be operating self driving taxi fleets in California next year. Tesla deserves getting dumped on for those comments because they are no where near self driving.
Andrej Karpathy just started working on Tesla's software 2 years ago, before what Chris Lattner did was a mess (he wanted to just have 1 task that learns magically everything), Andrej had to start everything from scratch.
Waymo had a 20 year advantage, but Google lost many key people there in the meantime as Larry Page didn't want to launch partial self driving.
I think both approaches are great and I wouldn't want to choose between the 2, just be a happy user of the end result of the competition.
> before what Chris Lattner did was a mess (he wanted to just have 1 task that learns magically everything), Andrej had to start everything from scratch
Sorry, I can't find the source, I'm reading Elektrek all the time and often there are people in the comments section with knowledge about what happens inside Tesla.
If you look at self driving automation as a black box, sure.
But at the same time people understand that on a highway Tesla Autopilot is safe enough to be used on a long boring road, and dricers generally feel less tired (and can focus more on the harder parts of the road).
Did you really follow how drivers reacted to the changes before/after Karpathy came there? People were extremely dissatisfied with the first versions of Autopilot 2 (as it was worse than Autopilot 1 when it appeared), but it improved a lot, and now it's definitely better.
I recall everyone saying Tesla "FSD" was awesome and industry leading, I see them saying that today, and I expect they'll be telling their grandchildren the same while being driven around in a Waymo.
In all seriousness, I like Karpathy and his work. Seems like a good guy. Not sure why you'd want to work to enrich a guy like Elon Musk though.
> Not sure why you'd want to work to enrich a guy like Elon Musk though
If you look at the alternative (Dieselgate), which is killing millions of people every year thanks to air pollution (sadly I'm highly affected by it, trying to not go near any polluted area is what my life is about at an age of 37), I'm happy for Elon Musk and I hope Tesla's mission will succeed as soon as it is possible.
