'Learning by doing' as presented by Hotz is all fine and dandy when you drive on a motorway with a very limited set of road signs, no pedestrians, no traffic lights, etc. Hotz also assumes people learn to drive by watching others, which is only partially correct. Traffic rules are not learned from experience. Low light conditions, fog, handling the car on snow and wet surfaces and numerous other factors have to be trained (if they can be taught through training). And after all that work, the algorithm must be tested extensively before it can be shipped into production. The reporter omits asking any questions regarding these aspects.
I don't see the problem with Tesla highlighting these aspects to people who may be fooled into thinking one boy genius would solve all the problems with self driving cars in a couple of years, while they (Tesla) are wasting time.
And I have to agree that getting such a complex and safety critical system production ready is beyond the reach of a single individual, no matter how talented they are. Its like a single individual might be able to build a rocket which can reach the edge of space, but not extend it to take human passengers into orbit (and back again safely).
And I'm not sure Tesla should be publicly congratulating him. While I do think it is very impressive what he has done, there is an element of reckless endangerment if he is indeed testing this on busy public roads after only a few hours of development.
If I were George, I would I'd use this project to either (i) get a job at one of the companies with significant resources so I could take the work further (but his short stints at a number of technology companies suggests he doesn't work well for others), or (ii) get funding so I could build a much bigger team to take the project further.
The classy thing to do would be congratulating the guy and encouraging even more open experimentation. I mean, they already are open-sourcing a lot of their work.
This statement doesn't seem in line with that.
EDIT: For what it's worth, this may have been the angle the reporter wanted: reporters are very good at stroking your ego and getting you to tell them things you shouldn't be telling them. Nonetheless, revealing email correspondence about private business/job dealings is not very classy, whether or not you're a big company.
A multi-zillion dollar company criticizing someone working in a garage, as amatic notes, is the opposite of classy.
Tesla's PR fell right into their assigned role of the big, rich, dumb rival. Which is silly, because they have great technology, and they are much smaller and faster to move then, say, the Big Three. Tesla plays as the underdog in stories of them vs big car companies.
The correction the title is referring to is in the third paragraph, it should have been the first, as the main point that they are not using vendor technology.
PR misstep, I suppose.
Stakeholders do not really care if Hotz say that and Musk said what. They just want to know their money is being spent correctly.
Soon enough, the two men started figuring out a deal in which Hotz would help develop Tesla’s self-driving technology. There was a proposal that if Hotz could do better than Mobileye’s technology in a test, then Musk would reward him with a lucrative contract. Hotz, though, broke off the talks when he felt that Musk kept changing the terms. “Frankly, I think you should just work at Tesla,” Musk wrote to Hotz in an e-mail. “I’m happy to work out a multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye.”
It didn't work out, but...
“I’m a big Elon fan, but I wish he didn’t jerk me around for three months,” he says. “He can buy the technology for double.”
Its a neat project and a serious amount of effort, well done. But come on, as others have said - a setback to the entire industry would be the outcome if he had a crash - doubly so, since he's publicly stated he intends to use the same Israeli component that everyone else uses. Tesla should try and distance themselves from this type of enterprise. The way it is portrayed in the article geohot seems to have a slightly flippant approach. Not sure if that's fair to him or not. ("Dude the first time it worked was this morning", "Don't touch that or we die.")
Well done, Tesla. Well done for making awesome cars, responding nearly instantly to something you barely needed to bother with, and not letting your legal team rewrite everything you say into oblivion.
Though I don't think that is the case, after yesterday's viral article, I'm sure as shit Hotz is going to raise VC fund and get a team going.
It wouldn't take many sensationalist headlines of crashes before a politician somewhere publicly "protects" their voters and the whole thing gets pushed back a decade.
You can see it in miniature today. This whole hoverboard craze has blown up (sorry) because of some dodgy wiring in some models. But when it comes to banning things, no-one's looking at the labels.
I thought it was quite odd the article was claiming otherwise. Remarketing an off-the-shelf solution for a feature that complex didn't seem like Tesla.
Can anyone recommend online courses in deep learning, neural networks and machine vision? I have kids that I need to prepare for a world that I just realised I hardly understand.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...
Doesn't seem like good PR.
If you're talking about a technical article intended for engineers interested in the field, maybe your take could work. This, however, is for the broad population and the original article painted Tesla engineers as nothing more than people wasting millions of dollars while a single guy in a garage can do the same. Not only the tone was disrespectful to all the work they've been doing, but it is also of concern to sales people that now have to explain why Tesla charges so much for something so easy to replicate.
It's a stopgap solution to get a basic system up (and that's what the Autopilot is, this kind of functionality was in cars years ago), but if they want to move into fully autonomous driving, they will need their own vision solution.
So kudos to him for making Tesla react, yes they were a bit needy, but they had to realign things a bit.
In the interview he said it himself, "I'm going to be the next billion dollar CEO". He finally built something that can be VC fundable and is legal enough to have ppl backing him.
But..you could be right too..it might just be a dead project soon (though I doubt it)
Startups though..he is vowing he'll build something smarter than Mobileye..seems pretty likely he's going to stay for at least another year in this and more if it's not failing.
