George Hotz - Comma.ai The Future of Autonomy:

george hutz is the founder and president of comma ai which is building vehicle automation technology based on machine learning and thank you so much george for being with us today i guess i want to start off with your slogan common slogan is making driving chill which i think is super awesome we are big fans of you know tesla autopilot and stuff on the show um i'd love to know more about comma ai like what essentially is it how does it work um well so first off to differentiate you know our slogan is make driving chill maybe tesla slogan is look at this crazy feature it's similar to tesla autopilot we think of autopilot like ios apple is vertically integrated you buy the iphone it comes with ios tesla is vertically integrated you buy the car it comes with autopilot um we're like android so we work across many different manufacturers just like android works on samsung and lg and motorola and google pixels we work on hondas toyotas volkswagens hyundais uh it's a box buy it it's now eleven hundred dollars it was a thousand dollars prices go up uh and you put on your windshield you connect it to the car uh which connects into the can buses and then it looks at the road decides where to drive sends the commands and the car drives there so i mean essentially it's a uh i assume you've taken like a cell phone and maybe made it to work for what you need to like is it essentially a cell phone for the hardware part were your cell phone pieces um so cell phones have this incredible economy scale uh if you can reuse parts of a cell phone it's uh economically advantageous and so do you have stereoscopic um cameras on the on it no um so it's kind of a myth that um humans use stereo to drive you don't need stereo cameras uh so the human stereo bass line is about five inches the baseline the distance between the cameras right um with a five inch bass line you can usually only see about like say 20 to 40 x your baseline okay so let's be generous 40x right so so 40 times 5 is uh 200 but 200 inches really isn't that far but i mean it's good enough for hunting a rabbit or you know oh is that saber tooth tiger gonna kill me like that's why we evolved to have eyes like this and not eyes way out here i mean that makes sense okay so having stereoscopic vision doesn't help when you're driving yeah the human depth perception is only used like look i can pick things up on this desk pretty easily and at this range i'm using my stereo but at driving ranges which are like you know 10 meters is close your stereo says nothing you have no stereo information and 10 meters for your two eyes um also the human two eyes is uh perhaps more for redundancy than stereo okay i just had this drilled into me that we had to have stereoscopic vision okay i mean if you wanted to have useful stereoscopic vision would you need to have one camera on either side of the car pretty much yeah so subaru does it if you look at the subaru eyesight system the cameras are pretty far apart but it really isn't very useful we can very precisely determine the distance to the car from uh one camera because you can make assumptions about the scene right you know the size of a car and you know the road plane so you can know we know where the car is accurate to like five percent which is plenty with one camera okay and so your system does it have a driver facing camera yep uh we have we have a camera which faces and monitors the driver as well uh i think this is one of the things autopilot gets wrong uh i don't like their paying attention detection uh touching the wheel especially when the wheel disengages is i don't think a good choice uh so we just watched the driver um and if the driver doesn't pay attention the system will beep and then it will disengage and so what kind of camera is it that's looking at the driver selfie cam my cell phone oh okay so you know because i know that some use infrared and well we do yeah so our new hardware this was the big difference from the eon in the comment too we replaced the selfie cab with a version without the infrared filter uh so most cameras have an infrared filter we uh got a version of the camera without it it's the same camera but no filter and then we have two ir leds on the bottom so we can do driver monitoring at night as well as during that so it'll look dark in the cabin to the human eye but for the computer vision it'll see so it's just a regular camera without the ir filter so it would look kind of bizarre if it took a picture but you don't care you're just looking at the person yeah it's got a very purpley glow to it i think we're using uh 850 nanometer leds so you know outside anything that humans gonna see but now you claim that you want to solve autonomous driving in measurable valuable increments which i thought was a really cool way to look at it because with tesla it's like everyone's gonna be mad at them until they get to final full self driving but with you guys you're saying you know when we get to a stage that we think adds value you can go ahead and buy it at that stage i mean tesla's doing the same thing as well right it's not like tesla is it's a and then you know i like tesla for this i think that it's the waymo and cruisers of the world who are doomed of these companies who are like we're not going to ship anything until it's perfect or like ramos ships i heard a good joke about waymo you know waymo is inverse moore's law two years ago the operational area was uh 100 square miles and now it's 50 square miles and if it keeps continuing at this rate in 20 years you won't even be able to fit one waymo car in the operating area well yeah explain that explain that to us because we do make fun of waymo a lot on the show that we think that they're doing it wrong they're mapping you know in instead of you know like a tesla car or your car can kind of be dropped in pretty much anywhere and and do its thing um why is waymo getting this wrong like they're smart people why are they getting wrong i mean waymo started in a very different time uh during that time it was unclear that waymo was the wrong approach but after you've like worked on it for a few years and you realize that the long tail is never going to stop you're never going to be able to hand engineer a solution to the driving problem you have to use big data and machine learning well okay who it way most capable of course correcting all right who at waymo can say hey wait a second uh the last ten years it was kind of stupid we should really do something different nobody nobody has that power well and you wouldn't want to you wouldn't want to say hey uh big money at google um you know how we've been working and i've been in charge um i've been doing it wrong the whole time can we do something different and it's and it's gonna be like uh well you're gone uh yep and it takes an elon musk like person to actually be able to do that and you know waymo doesn't have any elon musk type people now you have the second largest fleet outside of tesla according to you guys um and then you said likely to be the largest soon so i guess my first question is like how many roughly how many users do you have now uh about five thousand and then how can you get from five thousand to more than tesla's numbers soon is it because you don't have to build the cars yeah um so i mean you know soon is always uh when is soon uh is it going to be this year no um but is it going to be in the next 10 years i think so and because yeah we i mean there's a lot more android devices in the world than ios devices uh and this is for two reasons one um there's a lot more manufacturers android devices and two android devices span a whole price range right a tesla's never gonna make a fifteen thousand dollar car maybe but it's unlikely right with us you can buy a base model corolla you know fifteen sixteen thousand dollars stick the device in they'll drive uh so because we can we can target this low end we can target the used market there is a much larger potential audience for comma than for tesla what has to be in the car for you to control it because i mean i remember watching the myth busters or whatever and they would spend half the episode just getting the car to be a remote control car and there'd be servo motors and all this stuff there's none of that in your system you don't have so what changed in cars two things uh the the first thing that changed was electronic power steering um so most cars made after 2016. i think actually almost all cars made after 2016 2017 have electronic power steering uh meaning that parachuting used to be hydraulic it was a hydraulic pump which would uh be on the like accessory belts and it would uh keep pressure in the hydraulic system for steering um the problem is you have to run that pump continuously even when you don't need power steering and this would burn about one mile per gallon so if you want to make your car one mile per gallon more efficient replace the power steering motor with an electric power steering motor and uh the beautiful thing about electric power steering motors is they're controlled by software so there's a command on most cars that you can say hey put some torque on the steering wheel um that's how we do steering uh gas has been all cars are gas by wire since we had like fuel injection so that's like you know go back to the mid 90s um and then brakes uh vehicle stability control uh allows the brakes to be electronically actuated not always well enough um tesla actually the original model s couldn't run the brakes automatically but they added this thing called the ibooster and then the eye booster could do continuous like the brake pump was rated for continuous duty uh so yeah brakes electronics steering electronic gas electronics so what's the limiting factor on getting more users then for you guys i'm not interested what would i do with more users well more money i don't know like what you don't want more money not really no i want to sell self-driving cars right i want i want the right number of users that's do we could we do anything with more data right now not really we want to like i'm not saying you know we want no money we're not idiots i want enough money to run the company profitably and we had a fairly i mean not super profitable but we made money on the whole in 2020 uh but i think you're breaking i'm sorry i think you're breaking the rules of capitalism here you're supposed to say i want all the money give it to me i mean i want all the money too i'm not opposed to all the money i don't need all the money now right like like like the short termism that has uh invaded uh capitalism i think is incredibly destructive to long-term value creation you know i don't want a billion dollars tomorrow i want a trillion dollars in 10 years and so you're you're essentially doing that you're solving for that now because you're working on full self-driving um while you're selling um units to interested parties because it's not it's not the easiest thing in the world it's not like uh you know slapping on a new uh you know bumper sticker but they're quite a bumper sticker but it's easy now it's it's real easy uh you can anyone can do it pretty much like if you can if you've ever installed a gpu in a computer it's on par with that it's like if you can like if you're comfortable at all doing these things uh it's easy to do it takes about five minutes for example i rented uh i rented a toyota camry when i went up to seattle and it took me 10 minutes to install it put in the rental car took it out yeah you're able to put autopilot in uh you know gasoline-powered cars is there a difference between electric and gas powered because i mean with electric you can just say give me this much torque essentially and it'll do that with a gas car it's a little bit more involved yeah i mean controls are really not the limiting factor uh the electric controls are yes theoretically easier your amount of torque is beautiful but that's great for acceleration you can also negative torque to regen but okay how much regen capability you have where you don't get the power right um so there's there's there's nuances with electric control as well it's not like it's not it's not a full range of forward torque and backward torque right you have to take into account well yeah uh there's a reason that cars still have mechanical brakes and it's not just for redundancy it only gets so much regen and i assume steering is probably more important than acceleration control yeah the the i mean the gas is already it's gas by wire so okay the unit is not torque but it's pretty easy to put a closed loop like we have a closed loop control on the acceleration of the car right um so we we press the gas a little we see how much it accelerates if it's more than we wanted we back off if it's less than we wanted and you can like like feed forward that like simple controls our controls are dead simple like there's nothing fancy there it's a pid loop now we were checking out some makes and models that you guys can support on on your website and we were wondering there's a lot that you do support but there's a lot you don't like we were wondering about like the bolt and the volt like if you had a timeline on some of those is it hard because you have to actually physically have the car in-house to write the code for it oh no uh so we do support the vault we have about 150 volts um there's people online porting it to the bolt um basically you need two requirements for the car your car needs to have uh lane keeping assist and adaptive cruise control we could relax those requirements but because that's so common on cars today we haven't really felt a need to so openpilot just merged its hundredth car so i think we're at like 105 cars we support right now we do not own 105 cars most of those cars are user uh open pilot is open source there's a lot of very talented people out there hey i want to support my car okay it's a bit of request so we've talked a little bit about the hardware of the car it's essentially a bunch of smart phone components cheap and easy to acquire and then you hook it up into the car in the car if it's supported it has all the stuff that you need um so then what's the what's the brains behind it you just mentioned open pilot what is that um so open pilot is the software uh that runs on it's not like what really is a smartphone it uses some smartphone components um it still does run android but like there's no we ripped all the android stuff out the thing is written mostly in simples plus uh with a bit of python and this is a piece of software you can download github.compilot installed on the device and it's running the basic components are pretty much there's a model uh which is a deep learning model that looks at the picture says here's where i want to drive and then there's controls and the controls is like okay here's where you want to drive here's how i know how to send the commands to a toyota corolla 2020 to actually make it go in that path and so it's called open pilot because it's open sourced what does open source mean i think a lot of people don't fully understand it um so it means uh it can mean different things but so openpilot specifically is mit licensed which means the source code is available you can go on github and download it and it's mit licensed so aside from you know suing us you can do pretty much anything with that code right like the code has no warranty for purpose so we don't like promise you it will do anything but hey if you can figure out how to make it do something that's your legal right and why did you want it to be open source because if you're playing in an ecosystem like android had to be open sourced right microsoft tried with windows phone and windows phone flopped uh because nobody is going to buy a second inferior closed source system um you have to make the second player open source and there's no way that we'd be able to say support 100 cars if it wasn't open source right the the scale of the company required to do that is much much larger and i think there's so little downside like people are like oh but how are you going to extract value i'm like look don't worry about that solve the problem you have all the value you want all right so here's where i kind of get stuck with tesla's autopilot right there's level two where we're at now which is it's great i mean i love it it adds a lot of features for many drivers and in fact that's what jesse and i spend a lot of our time trying to tell people about is like you should really try this because it really is awesome for a 60-mile drive it just completely changes everything um and that's why i think you guys call it chill it you can chill out and relax but at the other end of the spectrum there's level five right which is the promise of getting to you know i can fall asleep in my car um but there's now gonna be these middle years right where we're gonna go from level two to level five in these middle years i'm gonna have to like wake up for my nap to take over you know if the car can't handle it or you know whatever level we're at are you excited about getting to level five or does the challenge of solving each new level is that what interests you i don't think the levels really mean that much i mean i think that like with the new tesla dmv thing tesla internally believes pretty much the same stuff the only difference between the levels is who's taking liability right in level two uh the driver is always liable in level three the manufacturer is sometimes liable in level four the manufacturer is liable in a predefined area and then level five manufacturers liable anywhere um why do i want liability i mean tesla knows this too i'm just more honest about it right we're level two forever and so that means for me as a driver so you know let's you're saying forever meaning five years from now when you have something that can drive me from a to b right yeah and yeah then but that is still very much in level two we are absolutely we absolutely want to build the type in your destination zero disengagements right we'll get there we're we're one two years behind us so i have a question about data gathering um what kind of data are you gathering right now what's important when you have your cars driving is it when the car is in comma that it's that you value that data or is it also when i'm just driving the car myself we take it all and so that's valuable for me driving it myself that's valuable data to you in fact we only train on you driving it yourself um when we train the models we do not train on when comma was driving because it's a feedback loop and you don't want that oh interesting and so do you label me as a driver so you're like zach's an awful driver let's give him a factor of one because he sucks it doesn't matter it doesn't matter oh interesting um it's another karenite quote uh all um good all good drivers are good in the same way all bad drivers are bad in different ways but because they're bad in different ways becomes noise and big data all right we have 5000 we have i think right now our new model that we just shipped was trained on 3200 different drivers the badness washes out and the goodness stays that's a good point i mean if you've ever been in the car with a bad driver they are usually bad in one specific way it's usually like why are you hugging the left line why are you hugging the right line and i guess it would just average out then okay so you gather this data you're gathering um all sorts of things that i assume you have to label we don't live late how does it work like is is the limiting factor that you need a whole bunch of people in a room doing stuff with that data and massaging it or is the deep learning really good at just figuring stuff out so tesla's very much about labeling stuff uh tesla has the data engine capacity talks about it all the time uh you know big segment team in the philippines uh we can't afford this so we don't do this um we automatically label the data so we have an automatic ground truthing stack um think about this we have a gps in the device as well as a gyro uh as well as an accelerometer we can figure out exactly the path that the car went on right and the paths in the future so if you can take the image and you can predict the path well that's all you need and that is automatically ground truthable no hand labeling required wow so this i mean i'm not that smart but that made a lot of sense to me why isn't tesla doing it that way um why isn't tesla doing it that way they're thinking about it um it's a trade-off like if we had more resources would be doing more of the things tesla's doing and we use we use a segment so that's like tesla's like like segment labels we use that for some part of our automatic ground tracing stack we have a project called comma pencil where we've hand labeled ten thousand images uh the community has done it um but those ten thousand images are not directly used for training the models they're used um in the automatic ground trooping stack to for example when you're trying to figure out the exact trajectory of a car we don't just use the gps and the and the imu we also use the camera um but when you're trying to figure out how the car moved well you better filter out the other cars in the scene because they're not moving with the scene so we use a we use a semantic segmentation for that because it's the best way to do it um so there's some like like like seed hand labeling but the like all the new data that comes in is automatically ground truth and added to the model so how do you test new features like so i'm assuming that um you know in one of your latest versions i heard that you could remove the lane lines right so is the car following the behavior of other drivers is it yeah i'm just i'm not clear on how you test your new features simulation uh so the lay line removal is you can't exactly say uh here are the ground truth paths for the images um because of this problem called behavioral cloning right if a human is hugging the left side of the lane the most likely next thing for them to do is not recover to the center of the lane it's actually to continue to hugging the lane because there's a lot more frames where they continue to hug the lane than the one where they happen to recover and because of this problem like you can't just do the obvious thing so we train it in the simulator right like we try to figure out where would have the human driven assuming that they made no mistakes and that's how we did it and we've gotten so good at this now that we actually no longer need the lanes as input to the driving policy so like for example it's a big problem you know think about when there's like an input and a like a merge someone else is coming in and you know it's like here and then like the lanes look like this right okay so the lengths look like this where do you position the car it's not really the center of the length but it's not also also hugging this lane it's kind of like you move over a little bit right um i don't think autopilot does this kind of subtlety that well our model didn't do it well when you were using explicit lanes it's really hard to code you have to learn it from data it's a good point i mean my tesla when there is the merge that you're talking about as soon as one lane disappears it goes start with lane quick let's get over and you're like whoa why are we going this way and uh we just tested out a ford the mock e the other day exact same thing it was like hey i'm not in the middle of the lane i should be moving across the highway here um so it's it's interesting to think that that wouldn't be the right like and that was just programmed in i'm assuming it was just like you should probably be in the middle of the lane and which sounds great until the lane becomes two lanes wide and the cars in the middle and everyone else is like that's not how you're supposed to drive tesla deals with some of this subtlety in okay ways uh the the all the other manufacturers you know completely hopeless in dealing with that but does that have to be human coded for them to fix it that's about different strategies not for us no we learn it data this is with the launch of this laneless model and you should really try it out uh it's zero three it's a toggle now this is this is an edge we have over tesla now tesla has a bunch of things over us they have a bigger fleet they have better cameras better hardware um but i think our machine learning's a bit fancier now what is your progression with disengagement i know that when i was hearing one of your recent interviews you were at about a year ago i think you were at a one disengagement for every 100 miles something like that you said when you got started it was like one every 10 miles are you on some kind of exponential curve or does it get really hard as you approach zero so right now like if you're driving on like decently well marked highways it's not really going to make mistakes anymore um it's all the subtlety in the edge cases where there are mistakes and like we've kind of stopped thinking about that number and we've started realizing first we're going to need to get to end to end everything so that laneless lateral is end to end lateral but our longitudinal is still very hand coded our longitudinal is still very based on detecting a car knowing the speed of that car and computing now you can't really do this right we have to first move to end and longitudinal and then we're going to think about disengagement numbers and driving them down because okay um let's say let's say in in lateral let's say your car positioning is bad right and you can see that it's bad from because the human like corrects it but that correction doesn't give you any information about how your lane lines were labeled drawn but it does give you information about how your path is labeled draw and that's why you need end to end before you can really focus on driving down to schedules and so what is end to end end to end means that the model is driving without reference to like things like lanes and cars it's just saying here's the path i want you to drive and 083 we've done it now for lateral we just have to go for longitudinal so handwritten code you'd say like here's where the lane lines are uh and then i'll have some system try and path the car within the lanes and i want it to be in the middle let's say end to end is saying like don't worry human coder i got this i will i will figure out where the lane lines are and decide where the car goes maybe it uses the lane lines maybe it doesn't it'll just say here's where the car should go and that assuming is going to like take into account other things entering the lanes like you know deer running across the road and trucks running into your lane and stuff it's going to take into account whatever the human took into account to decide the policy so what's your limiting factor for improvement is it you just said it's not users you're pretty happy with the number you have now is it data is it labeling is it processor speed is it sensors like what or is it just time it's none of those things it's bugs when you write like like traditional classical software right like say you're writing zoom if there's a bug maybe you zoom will crash right that's pretty easy to see and you can like do like a crash report you can debug that the problem with having bugs in machine learning is you have a bug let's say every one in ten lanes you didn't label right well it's not going to totally break your system it's going to subtly break it it's going to perform maybe 10 worse than it should then it turns out you have like 10 of these bugs and each one makes it 10 worse every time we fix a bug things just get better so that's the limiting factor debugging testing validating all of our models and like making sure that we're always moving forward because sometimes you'll make a change and part of it will get better and part of it will get worse and so what does the future of uh comma ai look like i mean in terms of are you gonna need to add more cameras at a certain point i mean like how do you cross an intersection while only looking forward right people always ask us about more cameras yes of course we need to add more cameras none of the almost none of the disengagements today are caused by a lack of cameras right like like that that stupid lane placement thing right like that that doesn't have anything to do with cameras i mean there's so much you can fix still with one camera and when it comes time what you think gradients you can't you think we can't build a device with three cameras this isn't that hard like like the machine learning is hard there's hard problems here and it's not building the thing with three cameras i can go to any you know i can go to any foxconn samsung and be like yo like three cameras and they're like yeah we know how to do that it's like the iphone spread them out a lot more so how about this age-old controversy lidar versus cameras you know that we've heard with elan a million times i mean elon recently tweeted that he's not even gonna use radar anymore uh was he smart to do that approach but then you raised the other question of like rain fog darkness what do you think we're moving away from radar too we're gonna be a camera only humans drive cars with cameras only uh people think of the driving problem as like this uh rigid problem right like they're operating like uh like a like a plow in a field or a miner or a starship docker right like uh those things are maybe appropriate to use lidar because they're very like physics based problems a driving is not a physics based problem driving is a psychology problem the hard part in driving is not staying in the middle of the lane the hard part in driving is being like look at that guy what's he gonna do actually there's a flip side of that too it's not just look at that guy what he's going to do it's driving your car in such a way that the guy behind you understands what you're going to do it's not just important to predict but it's also important to be predictable and that's why the only acceptable policy for driving is the human policy machine-based policies are dangerous you have to drive like a human if you want to inter-operate on human roads and then you have these like utopian googly fantasy people who's like we're going to lobby the city government replace all the roads with tiny waymo bubble cars i'm like yeah that's gonna happen yeah well how about v to v i mean what do you think that that would solve some of these problems if cars were talking to each other so we have v to v com actually already ships with feedback every car manufactured after like 1950 has a radio transmitter built into it that tells you like when it's gonna break and does it do anything like why why have they had these and it hasn't done anything you know every car after 1950 has has a radio transmitter that says when it's going to break right it's in the pay to hertz range so it's it's it's very high frequency but the nice thing about it being high frequencies it's easy to localize you can see like like the higher frequency low frequency radio waves is hard to figure out where they're coming from but high frequency radio waves you can see exactly where they're coming from and yeah the comma 2 ships with a sensor that's capable of of receiving these radio waves and we know when the car is going to are going to break i i know the transmitter but like how many cars have receivers so the receiver is is is more and more calm in the warning okay so by the way guys i'm talking about brake lights right brake lights are radio transmitters oh oh receivers right like like people think oh it's radio what is light it's electromagnetic radiation okay because it's so high frequency you can localize it so well right like this is the joke of b to v i can you know we have brake lights and blinkers guess what that's all you need i see and so that is v to v we've all we've had v to b further we've just been overlooking it all these years i got you of course right and people think like this this new system is going to be better at like much lower frequencies which you can't localize it's a very complicated protocols like the brake light protocol is very simple it's great but i mean you know what about corners and stuff you can't see you know these high frequency radio waves light isn't so good at penetrating you know solid objects so wouldn't it be better if the car was constantly you know telling like i'm here i'm here i am here and then another car goes like you are there okay i understand you don't need that you don't need any of that i mean you know the whole the whole the whole car is a it's not it's not a it's not a transmitter but it's a passive reflector right i mean like like like light is radio waves right if you try to sell these camera people and you tell them oh it's a fancy v to v radio receiver yeah maybe they'll like it better but i mean we've we've been constantly hearing about v to v stuff for the longest time it's just it's as it's as no it's as dumb as it sounds absolutely okay i just wanted to i'm always worried that i'm like thinking this sounds really stupid you know what the beauty of not even like brake lights so you will get a ticket by the way if you're if you're if your radio transmitter doesn't work right cops give you tickets for that but um the the whole car right this big metal body it's a radio it's a radio wave reflector right so your car has has has transmitters uh which transmit broad spectrum these are the headlights right and then they they bounce that stuff off the other cars you can see the other cars right and the beauty of this system is it can't really like break right the second oh you want to put software in the loop look at the boeing 737 max right you know it works really well a big piece of metal and you see the metal and you're like oh i'm not gonna hit that and so why muddy it up with more systems that could be fooled because i mean i remember hearing about like the radar system and they would have to train to make sure that if they got a really strong radar signal that it wasn't just like a piece of metal that was slightly bent and you know not just reflecting but also refracting radio signals back radar triggers on every manhole cover and bridge and this is this is like i i don't you know we kind of want to move away from radar for the same reason we've already so like for a while when open pilot first shipped radar was our primary sensor and we had a backup vision system now vision is our primary sensor and we use radar as a backup because vision just is more reliable um radar like for example um so you think the bridge in the manhole cover problem right and they will show up identically on uh automotive radar to a stationary car right um so you're like well these should be easy to disambiguate because like metal covers are down here and bridges are up here and cars are here right but the radar has really no resolution in this access whereas a camera tons of resolution right i feel like a thousand pixels so when someone finally wins this game of full self-driving let's say it's tesla is it the kind of thing that other players will be able to reverse engineer and come up with a couple years later or is it the kind of thing where once someone wins it there it's really hard to figure out part of the beauty of us being open source is look again maybe maybe i don't play capitalism right but i like making money but i also like the idea of just obliterating billions of dollars of value all these people who think they're gonna solve self-driving cars and then rent seek losers i'm going to solve it and give it away for free and then there'll be no access to compete with us so you ask like is it something someone can reverse engineer and figure out they don't even have to they can just download openpipe it's free now we've posited a bunch of ideas on this channel we had a 10-part autonomous driving future series where i i talked about the you know the future will be you know much safer there'll be less traffic deaths likely a drop of two to three orders of magnitude of deaths per year traffic will disappear uh the number of cars on the road will drop by like a factor of 10 parking lots will disappear all this kind of stuff am i crazy i agree with some of what you said uh so driving fatalities will decline they will continue to decline exactly on the same curve that they happen right like there is no discontinuity for autonomous vehicles it's going to be the exact same would you look you know at a car like 50 years ago deaths per vehicle mile traveled oh it was insanely high and then like you looked at the car and they were solid pieces of steel like somebody didn't you know take high school physics and learn about momentum they're like we'll build a really rigid piece of steel and then it'll hit something at 30 miles an hour and someone will die right like today you know you could i could crash a car into a brick wall at 45 miles an hour and like get out walk away and be like yo sorry car um right and this is you know especially like tesla without having a you know no engine in the front like that whole thing's just a combo zone um so cars will continue to get safer on the exact same trajectory uh vehicle fatalities will fall as they happen um in terms of less traffic and less cars on the road i don't know about that um you can say that traffic might decline right like if you think the cause of traffic is people slamming on their brakes maybe we could start to see some alleviation of traffic if more people start using good adaptive cruise control systems so i mean let's say well let's say like in i don't know two or three years you have a really good open pilot system and um you decide i'm going to want to sell a lot of these because i think you know either the benefit to society or the benefit to yourself or for whatever reason and pretty much all cars on the road now have uh open pilot in them and most people want to use it most of the time and it can do most of the a to b driving so everyone's kind of you know chilled relaxes a lot less road rage and the cars hopefully work together to or just are just a little bit less terrible than human drivers in terms of you know contributing to traffic problems do you think the traffic would be alleviated or do you think that so many new people would want to get on the road yeah i think i think so many new people are going to want to get on the road i think i don't see a i certainly don't see a reduction in vehicle miles traveled right i actually see an increase the more convenient you make something the more people that will do it i know that i drive more because i have open pilot right like i drove up to la twice in the last week there and back and i'm like would i do that if i just have open files probably not let's just say i mean do you think that the robo taxi model is going to happen in the next uh foreseeable amount of time in some places in very limited places in the same places where uber's successful in places like san francisco and new york yes without a doubt you're going to have robo taxis at some point i don't think they're going to happen anytime soon and i don't think they're ever going to pay back the massive investment that has gone into these robo taxi companies but yeah i mean cities it's you know it's like where is public transportation possible right it's it's like that um are the majority of cars on the road going to be robo taxis no because the majority of cars on the road aren't taxis but i mean let's so let's go with tesla's model so as opposed to waymo where waymo is pouring you know just as much money as as god wants to pour money into it uh to make it work um and it'll probably never pay itself back through cheap ride sharing rides but let's go to like a tesla model where the dream is that you own your tesla and then you go to work and you say buy a car go make me some money and it says i will go do that is that do you think that that's a viable model maybe but it is certainly more than five years away and probably more than 10 years away and beyond that it's kind of just like trying to talk about what's going to happen in 10 years is really difficult trying to talk about like paradigm shifts like discontinuities 10 years from now you know what i can talk about pretty confidently 10 years from now cpus are going to be about 32 times faster than they are today or like faster cheaper moore's law because moore's law will continue right it's held for you know 40 years i think it'll continue to offer another 40. um predicting this massive shift to robo-taxis i don't know well i mean that's very interesting so i mean you can you can decide where what the computer might look like but you're not going to be able to tell what it's going to be in yeah and like to talk about like new successful business models yeah do i think this will happen i think that it'll follow if you plot the growth rate of uber i think that the growth rate of robo taxis will be simple i don't think there's ever going to be like a huge jump discontinuity and it will continue to go up but are the majority of vehicle miles traveled going to be robo taxi miles in the next 10 years about a million bucks against them now there's this legendary story about you helping tesla to work on their self-driving back around i think was 2015. when tesla was trying to get away from mobilize system and develop their own system can you tell us a little bit about that tesla's yeah basically tesla's looking to hire people to join the autopilot vision team it was a contract dispute i ended up starting comma there's not much more to it than that but let me ask you is that what started to get you interested in in this problem and why is this problem so interesting to you i mean it's probably the coolest applied ai problem today uh also like truck driver's most common job in america maybe i like to build things that are like you can describe it to a kindergartner but the underlying technology is like mad complex like yo check it out you put the box in the car you lean back and and that's just interesting enough for you to be working on i mean i mean you're a smart guy you could be doing anything else i think solving this problem is one of the big ones that's going to lead to progress in ai like it's not like go you can solve go go is a cool problem and like i would like to work on like like things like that as well but the problem with go is well it doesn't interact with the real world go has a very clear model it's a model of go it's a simple model right the model of the real world is so so much more complex so it's kind of like you know a level above solving these video games let's talk about the singularity for a second here because i i try to picture this and as we see self-driving cars i feel like autonomous driving cars are one of the first indications we have of how close we're coming to the singularity do you think that's true that this is kind of an indication of of the time scales yes i think that that autonomous car i mean i think that like go was a big you know chess was a big one then go than autonomous cars what what goes after that yeah well because after that just just just ask them for a friend you know the last job to be replaced is computer programmers uh because once you like like programming is tool complete right like truck driving's not right truck driving you can build tools to help you but you know no one really gets all economics but like programming you're using the best tools you possibly can when you solve that when computers start to make the breakthroughs and ai themselves what's your view on traditional big auto companies um will they be able to keep up with tesla do you think many of them will fail will they be able to use your system and so thereby keep up with tesla i think what's going to happen here is um the exact same thing that happened in the phone industry you're going to have like the like the players like nokia who historically had like dominated part of a space and they're going to fall off hard um maybe that's a ford maybe that's a toyota maybe that's a bmw right like these these like like big names where you know kind of arrogant right um and i think that there's going to be room for you know companies like hyundai who who are more agile who've had more of an upstart the first companies to embrace all the pilot have a huge head start right like like you know i'm not i don't pitch the automakers no i'm not talking to these people you know you if the automakers want to talk to me i charge a thousand bucks for phone call like because you know it's it's their loss i am that confident in this that the automakers who choose to embrace doesn't necessarily have to be open pilots but the automakers who choose to embrace a more like modern approach to software are going to succeed the car is a consumer electronics device and so the success that you're seeing is it because the cars are electric because they have autopilot in them or because they're going to be able to have a lot more you know fun casinoy kind of stuff in them i think electric is going to happen i don't think electric's really a selling point um i think electric is a selling point to some like niche group of people uh when you actually look like even people when you think about the environmental impact of electric it's like well yeah that's great you got a coal power plant over here and the power comes clean through the wires into your car but there's still a cold power plant right like modern cars that are getting 40 50 miles per gallon they have the same energy efficiency as electric for the most part uh so i mean i'm you know nuclear power like once we start building a lot more efficient reactors maybe a couple fusion reactors like that's when electric cars really start to make sense but if if all of america switched to electric cars tomorrow the power grid would collapse right so you can you can you can forecast the growth of electric cars with the growth of the power grid that's going to be the limiting factor um so no i don't think electric's really a selling point i think the selling point is the car as a consumer electronic device when people start thinking about selling it the same way that they sell phones or tvs i love tvs you know think about 20 years ago the tv that cost you five thousand dollars like today it would be like a laughable joke i can buy 150 roku tv from a tcl you know on amazon and it's way way better than anything anyone had 20 years ago no matter how rich you are um so yeah when cars start to embrace consumer electronicism and what does that look like like what do you mean so for example um every phone has ota updates every tv has oti updates um what cars have rta updates let's see uh tesla open pilot that's it volkswagen's trying oh they're trying but you know it's none of the ship right like these cars can't ota it's like drive it back to the factory to get some like like software update like it's a joke i think that the crazy part is that cars will have like a um a hot spot in the car and then it's like but to update the maps i need to go to the dealership and plug in a usb drive it's just like it's always astounding to me but so you think that really ota updates are going to be what's going to change the auto industry ota updates are one of the things on the path to embracing that you're building a consumer electronic right another thing again i think hyundai is doing a lot of this right i have a 2020 sonata it's a great car um the company is toyota who are shipping like oh do you want a 5-inch resistive touchscreen do you want something that wouldn't have even been competitive on a smartphone 10 years ago no no i actually want a 20-inch capacitive touchscreen right and like tesla knows this right again and then the hyundai one is good mercedes has some good things here some of the car manufacturers do understand this then the people who are shipping those tiny resistive touchscreens what are you doing do you not understand what you build i want to talk about this point in history when i was a kid in the late 70s and 80s i remember getting our first home computer a trs-80 and i was like this is amazing i remember the first sound card i got in a computer i'm like this is amazing but in between there's long periods of like this isn't so amazing now i feel like with neurolink and spacex and starlink and all these things i'm like every day seems amazing does it feel that way to you that we're just in this amazing period or is it always just gonna feel this way going forward i find it interesting that the three things you described are elon musk companies and i think that's a problem that's a minority the majority of the money is going into wall street and ads right like until these things like die you know we could be doing so much more the fact that it's like very few people doing anything is kind of uh concerning uh from uh like you know how the future is going to play out perspective but um oh yeah it's very exciting like things are getting things are getting good now when you say that people aren't doing anything i mean there's people who are getting up early in the morning they're going to work and then they come home but you're saying that basically they're not they're not changing the world not only are they not changing the world right like there's a lot of people out there who like you know you go to like a coffee shop and you like like you know you make lattes for people right like you're not changing the world but you're doing something right like you're not you know it's not like like something something but it's it's something it's not like i'm talking about the like executives of google and facebook right like these people they could do something else they have a choice they have so much capacity but what do they go and do they sell ads right the people who like you know oh man i just like brilliant kids in my high school you know math and physics what are they doing well i joined a hedge fund they made me 400 000 a year like you're a loser being paid in fake money the money's fake oh people like george what conspiracy theories do you believe in i'm like i believe that in 1971 they made the dollar backed by nothing and you all run around and compete for these fake dollars they're like u.s points fed coin oh yeah hedge funds and ads yeah well okay we gotta get out of the hedge funds mans way of thinking about things and so it sounds like you're you're upset at the smart people who become complacent over money uh especially when they're not doing anything and you're you're making money like it's not like it's not like you're you know living on the street or anything but you are doing something that uh all of these people do you think that all these people that you're complaining about and i'm i'm i'm putting i'm saying you're complaining about them but i mean i'm complaining about that do you think that they could be doing what you're doing i think that some people are just they're always going to like look for a job right some people this is just who they are they're not like they're not going to go out and start something this is fine it's just unfortunate that the jobs are at hedge funds and ad companies right like i think they could just as easily be going to work at like you know boeing used to build good planes like like the 787 is a beautiful plane what happened oh well there we are we are of course sourced the labor center we cut these costs and you built the 737 max which is such a disgusting airplane the 737 max is is is a obvious physical symbol of the decline of of this kind of culture they were too cheap to raise the landing gear so they stuck the engine out too far and now the plane's unstable when it looks like this so they put in some software to detect when it looks like this and make it go like this but the software messed up and it kept detecting it was going like this so it went like this and like this like this like this i see that comma ai is hiring right now um do you need to have a college education to work for common ai no i don't really care i i just like you need to like just kind of know things and the kind of people who we hire just happen to like they know a lot of things about a lot of things and the way that you get like this is you're just kind of curious about things and you start start looking up things and like like it's way more than like someone who like took college education and like those people don't know things those people followed a four-year course curriculum where maybe they learned what was in the course or maybe they just learned enough to pass the test so like you know in my interviews i'll do like i'll ask questions in ways they've never heard them before and that's how you can tell whether these people actually know things or whether they study for tests and i mean if you were king of the world it sounds like you you kind of do sometimes and sometimes you sound like you you don't want to be um but if you if you were king of the world um and you were in charge of the educational system i don't know if this is something that you care about or want to tweak i mean what what would it how different would it look oh a lot more people would fail colleges brag about their low acceptance rates and high graduation rates it should be the other way around high acceptance rates low graduation rates and so i mean you're you're talking specifically about college but i mean you know using the technology that we've acquired since the latest you know evolution in schooling that was any good there's no ed tech's all fake i think the the the best education is just you know somebody who like knows things teaching people who are like smart and want to know things but i mean it i mean i i know what you're saying about the like technology where they're just like you know oh we got a 3d printer in the computer lab recently that no one knows how to use and it's always broken i i get that but i'm saying like if you were to completely gut it redesign the entire educational system from kindergarten to whatever grade system you would use i mean would it would it look completely different or is that just something you're not that interested in i don't think about it that much but like my one thing about college is like you want high acceptance rates and low graduation rates and and like you almost want that in all in all in all school right like they're like talking about like oh look this many people finished high school right how much dumber did you make high school again so it's something people are bragging about right like you want you want higher graduation rates make the school stupider well but then are you worried about the people who don't pass or or fail like are are you worried about them do you just whatever this is this is like like like a political question but you know i guess i i i yeah like i guess i i asked the question of like well you know technology has produced more wealth for the world i'm living better than a king of france my salary's 78 thousand dollars a year like i'm getting paid like uh like a like a a you know just it's a decent salary i can afford pretty much everything i want but like i got an hvac system yeah who built hvac systems yeah i like that guy when did you know that you were on the path to be an entrepreneur was it since you were a kid did it come about like after leaving college like when when did that become obvious to you i'm not an entrepreneur i just wanted to you know i saw elon as a worthy adversary i wanted to be still there that's what we're doing you know it's like a little like you know everyone's self-driving cars right i'm excited about the lane list stuff i think this actually might i don't know i'd really like to be tesla i like i think tesla's ahead of us and i think they're probably going to win but you know at least like i'm so happy that they're out there it's worthy competition right like what fun is it if it's just like me stomping all over like toyota i want to go back to this question of the users though i kind of picture if you have venn diagram of your users you have to be pretty techy you have to be pretty much into cars and it seems like those venn diagrams means that you've got a fairly small user base i know you said it's easy to install and i agree with you it probably is i haven't installed one yet i'm dying to but i know that there's a lot of people who are afraid to even take a you know panel off their car and so that's probably like stops a lot of people um going forward are you going to have to like convince those people to give this a try like how how are people going to find out about this how are they going to want to put this in their cars we don't put any real effort into growth but here's what i think is going to happen um as the system gets better and as it's their value prop is so incredibly clear they'll just have installer services right dealerships dealerships are stuck doing it right dealerships again people who know nothing about the cars they're like they buy the you know the device from us for two grand they sell to the user for four and is that the model that you want or would you rather work with the oems and just have it i like that i like the dealer model better it's ground up um you can't work with the oems it's impossible right like like like we've been contacted by oems but like who from the oed who has any power inside super nobody i can speak with the ceo of subaru but it's not elon musk who i could like talk to about real things the guy's like an mba are you worried about the oems going forward that they try and thwart you if if they're trying to sell their systems they're you know pro pilot 360s and they're whatever and they're like uh-oh uh our pro pilot 360 doesn't operate as well as common ai um people ask me this question and you know they can go look at my wikipedia page and see how i bested apple and sony and these were companies with with with 10 plus million dollar budgets for preventing piracy and securing the ecosystem you think that that toyota or ford is going to stop me so i mean and they can't really just pull out the the plugs you know they can't or or whatever right like not really no like we tap into the camera they'd have like like to change the plugs to try to thwart us is like okay they could make installation more difficult maybe but it would also make installation for them more difficult right if they're willing to like burn you know you you this is a crypto saying like you can't defend against a suicidal whale right if the car companies wanted to burn and make their stuff worse just to keep us out then yeah they could do it but if they want to keep their stuff any good no no i don't really so you said that elon was a worthy adversary why do you need an adversary and why and why is elon like your adversarial pick it's not like a real adversary but like you know you need like you know in some ways you you need someone who's you know going to be able to appreciate what you've done right that's i think what moves the world kind of forward so you're like the sherlock holmes to the uh was it my crop no that's his brother uh i'm worried already yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm the more you know you want to be the show i got the more yard all right that's awesome that's really a great place to end i mean it's so great to hear that he kind of inspired you he inspired us i mean what we're doing every day is because of him and it sounds like what you're doing is because of him and and it's really great to see that you're actually making the world a safer better place more enjoyable place i'm here to solve cool problems just for intellectual glee so all right you you're you're kind of a young guy and this problem seems like it's probably going to be maybe buttoned up in your lifetime have you and and your lifetime i've heard is going to be pretty long um i'm a little forever but yeah so i mean why aren't you working on immortality first why are you working on this problem and then immortality this problem is solvable oh yeah they're going to be solved in five or 10 years but like why not wouldn't you want to get ahead on the immortality part then you'd have plenty of time to worry about everything else i don't think it's you know you know i think that there's not really a i've been studying bio uh but like i don't really have a good like like again it's very hard to talk about to plan anything for 10 plus years in the future sure um i will bet heavily against immortality working in the next 10 years a good thing i don't need it to and i would bet on self-driving cars i would bet on uh superhuman self-driving cars in the next 10 years this does not mean robo taxes by the way but this just means that there are cars capable of driving at a superhuman level on the road in the next 10 years that's awesome that's the world i want to live in yeah and and i mean less likely for you to die in a car accident if that's the case so it sets you up well for the next accident i just hope it's quick you know george thank you so much for your time today this is a really delightful talk i've learned a lot and i can't wait to talk to you again awesome thanks for having me you

Channel: Disruptive Investing

Views: 94,927

Keywords: disruptive, investing, stock market, stocks, stock exchange, new york, usa, companies, startup, invest, what to invest in, future, technologies, tech, company, disruptive investing, club, top, investments, money, save, bank, growth, exponential, science, sustainability, george hotz, comma ai, artificial intelligence, tesla, engineer, former, employee, toyota

Id: 4PwgZX9G9Xo

Length: 55min 54sec (3354 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mindbridgeweb]

Fun interview.

[8:47] Q: So what's the limiting factor on getting more users for you guys?

A: Not interested. What would we do with more users?

Q: Uh, more money? You don't want more money?

A: Not really, no. I want to solve self-driving cars.

[u/Baoty]

Stumbled upon a new interview with George Hotz. For those not familiar with him: He has a past with Tesla around 2015, but ended up starting his own AI company for autonomous vehicles. Very peculiar but interesting guy, and he has some very interesting views on Tesla and other competitors.

TLDW: Bullish for Tesla

[u/ValueInvestingIsDead]

George Hotz interviews w/ Lex Fridman are among my favourite.

[u/TeslaFanBoy8]

Fun to watch. Brilliant fellow.

[u/SoftBellyFlop]

Why so angry thumbnail? Makes him look like a spoiled 15 year old. Love the aura of laughter the Tesla team puts up, especially compared to this chad (I know he is a genius, but still)

[u/[deleted]]

Not matter what company... The code will determine the AI. So, a company can hire the brightest code people and other companies can hire 2nd best. Long term... It is a Pandora's Box. AI will progress and get better with the hype around it. Just have to get people who wrote code to solidify together. Just like Graphic Designers or web developers in the early 90s. Ideas and progress is not always about money. Sometimes it is just a simple scene effect that creates progression.