>Speaking of, how did he not lose credibility at “full self driving next year, better buy it now”-Tesla?
That I also want to know. He bailed out of Tesla right when the limitations of his "LIDAR-less cameras only self driving" system were becoming obvious, and nobody asked him about the hindsight of this obvious fuckup.
>but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
Exactly. You lead the R&D, so it's on you. If your boss makes stupid decisions in public overriding your best judgement, the leave and go somewhere where your decisions be respected. The ML market was red hot for people like him back then so it's not like he didn't have alternatives.
Although I doubt Elon forced that idea on him, since he's the one who was confidently claiming that vision only is better since Lidar pollutes the sensor fusion data.
>Guess his boyish looks and his videos educating outsiders and students about AI contributed..
IDK but if I judge a head of ML, I'd care more about whether he has delivered technically, not if he's good at PR.
The ZIRP era lead to SV ML scene to be full of false prophets who were just good at PR and advertising for their employer because they were popular with the industry hype, than at actually getting shit that works delivered out the door.
It's good that the money and hype bubbles bursts every now and then as only then are the scammers, false gods, and naked emperors revealed and can the house get cleaned of them.
>Although I doubt Elon forced that idea on him, since he's the one who was confidently claiming that vision only is better since Lidar pollutes the sensor fusion data.
How do you get a labeled dataset for your ML model? Obviously you use lidar, except the engineers had to do it in secret because Elon has fired engineers that used lidar even during the development process.
With a cursory glance at Tesla's hardware the rest of the self driving car industry quickly surmised that it was at the time nowhere near sufficient to to deliver L4 autonomy, and that's before sensor modalities entered the equation. Karpathy was either BSing for money, or he actually believed the hype. Either way it was a bad look.
> it was at the time nowhere near sufficient to to deliver L4 autonomy
It still isn't. Show me a video based only vision system that's even L3. Current systems like Waymo are using video, radar, and lidar. Even lidar isn't enough. Each of them provides a different benefit. I mean radar can even do something humans can't, see in fog, why would you not want radar? And I mean at that time Tesla was using 1.2MP cameras...
Truth is what they did was impressive, but given their constraints, but the constraints were self-imposed and unnecessary. So it's more impressive in the way that it is impressive when someone that was shot crawled their way to the hospital. Still impressive even if they shot themselves, but it sure does make you feel a little different...
The original Autopilot team had some great talent. Elon fired them and then sued them because they wouldn't shut up about Lidar. Elon couldn't say "Every new Tesla is FSD ready" if every new Tesla needed Lidar for that to be true, that was the constraint.
The Woz was on TV in an interview saying he bought 2 Model 3s, one for himself and one he could put to work after the robotaxi update. Regular everyday suckers too were taking on crippling debt to buy Teslas because their cars were gonna pay for themselves after the magical update.
>The original Autopilot team had some great talent. Elon fired them and then sued them because they wouldn't shut up about Lidar.
OK, so then why didn't Karpathy also leave in protest? Unless he also supported Elon's decision in which case he's complicit and just as responsible as ELon.
Karpathy didn't leave in protest because he was the guy hired to replace the protesters. His job was to be a credible technical authority on ML backstopping the sales pitch that Full Self-driving could be achieved on Tesla's hardware.
Well then, if he chose to be the fall guy and trade his honor and credibility in exchange for Elon's money and Tesla's prestige at the time while the going was good, why the defense for him now?
That I also want to know. He bailed out of Tesla right when the limitations of his "LIDAR-less cameras only self driving" system were becoming obvious, and nobody asked him about the hindsight of this obvious fuckup.
>but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
Exactly. You lead the R&D, so it's on you. If your boss makes stupid decisions in public overriding your best judgement, the leave and go somewhere where your decisions be respected. The ML market was red hot for people like him back then so it's not like he didn't have alternatives.
Although I doubt Elon forced that idea on him, since he's the one who was confidently claiming that vision only is better since Lidar pollutes the sensor fusion data.