<story><title>Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-expert-andrej-karpathy-to-lead-autopilot-vision</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>What this really reflects is that Tesla has painted itself into a corner. They&amp;#x27;ve shipped vehicles with a weak sensor suite that&amp;#x27;s claimed to be sufficient to support self-driving, leaving the software for later. Tesla, unlike everybody else who&amp;#x27;s serious, doesn&amp;#x27;t have a LIDAR.&lt;p&gt;Now, it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;later&amp;quot;, their software demos are about where Google was in 2010, and Tesla has a big problem. This is a really hard problem to do with cameras alone. Deep learning is useful, but it&amp;#x27;s not magic, and it&amp;#x27;s not strong AI. No wonder their head of automatic driving quit. Karpathy may bail in a few months, once he realizes he&amp;#x27;s joined a death march.&lt;p&gt;If anything, Tesla should have learned by now that you don&amp;#x27;t want to need to recognize objects to avoid them. The Mobileye system works that way, being very focused on identifying moving cars, pedestrians, and bicycles. It&amp;#x27;s led to at least four high speed crashes with stationary objects it didn&amp;#x27;t identify as obstacles. This is pathetic. We had avoidance of big stationary objects working in the DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005.&lt;p&gt;With a good LIDAR, you get a point cloud. This tells you where there&amp;#x27;s something. Maybe you can identify some of the &amp;quot;somethings&amp;quot;, but if there&amp;#x27;s an unidentified object out there, you know it&amp;#x27;s there.  The planner can plot a course that stays on the road surface and doesn&amp;#x27;t hit anything. Object recognition is mostly for identifying other road users and trying to predict their behavior.&lt;p&gt;Compare Chris Urmson&amp;#x27;s talk and videos at SXSW 2016 [1] with Tesla&amp;#x27;s demo videos from last month.[2]
Notice how aware the Google&amp;#x2F;Waymo vehicle is of what other road users are doing, and how it has a comprehensive overview of the situation.  See Urmson show how it handled encountering unusual situations such as someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom.  Note Urmson&amp;#x27;s detailed analysis of how a Google car scraped the side of a bus at 2MPH while maneuvering around sandbags placed in the parking lane.&lt;p&gt;Now watch Tesla&amp;#x27;s sped-up video, slowed down to normal speed.  (1&amp;#x2F;4 speed is about right for viewing.)
Tesla wouldn&amp;#x27;t even detect small sandbags; they don&amp;#x27;t even see traffic cones. Note how few roadside objects they mark. If it&amp;#x27;s outside the lines, they just don&amp;#x27;t care.  There&amp;#x27;s not enough info to take evasive action in an emergency. Or even avoid a pothole.&lt;p&gt;Prediction: 2020 will be the year the big players have self-driving. It will use LIDAR, cameras, and radars. Continental will have a good low-cost LIDAR using the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts at an affordable price point.&lt;p&gt;Tesla will try to ship a self-driving system before that while trying to avoid financial responsibility for crashes. People will die because of this.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;player.vimeo.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;192179727&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;player.vimeo.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;192179727&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-expert-andrej-karpathy-to-lead-autopilot-vision</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ccorda</author><text>Seems to be taking Chris Lattner&amp;#x27;s place:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;clattner_llvm&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;877341760812232704&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;clattner_llvm&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;877341760812232704&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>