Correction to article: "First Person to Hack iPhone Built Self-Driving Car" | Hacker News Reader

Correction to article: "First Person to Hack iPhone Built Self-Driving Car"

teslamotors.com

148 pointsjdkanani47 comments

Both articles were written for a wide audience, which includes non technical people. Tesla's image and technology were bashed by someone claiming to know everything there is to know in the field. Non technical people see 'a limited demo on a known stretch of road' and assume Tesla engineers are idiots who wasted two years when they could have employed this awesome dude to think outside the box (that's always cool) and magically implement machine learning to solve all the problems.

'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.

Seems a reasonable response to me. After reading the original article I was left with the impression that Tesla had outsourced the development of their autonomous driving technology, and this changes that impression.

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.

They seem sort of defensive and needy. "Oh, the didn't reaaally make a better car then we did, we had that two years ago, and ours is so much better and ... ". Of course it is, the guy made it in his garage.

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.

They came across in that statement as insecure and having self-esteem issues that they had to downplay or belittle the brilliant guy's work just to feel better about themselves or to dispel their investors fears of an imminent competition emerging to challenge their position in the market.

I have a feeling MobileEye wanted Tesla to release something like this.

Right - the relationship with MobileEye, and motivation for in house staff, are really important.

On the contrary, I thought Hotz came off in the original article as a bit too arrogant when he basically bashed Tesla's autopilot in order to sell the reporter on his own project.

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.

I think if you are a person working in a garage you can get away with bashing products from multi-zillion dollar companies.

A multi-zillion dollar company criticizing someone working in a garage, as amatic notes, is the opposite of classy.

It's rather like the rule of comedy: you're allowed to "punch up", but not down.

Where's the criticism? They merely pointed out (to non technical people) there's a long way to go to reach 99.9999% precision. They said nothing bad about Hotz achievement (except that it's relatively easy to achieve). They also corrected a mistake in the article regarding developing the autopilot in-house.

"you got nothing" is kind of empty criticism

The reaction toward the article about geohot is largely positive in his favor. I wish him no harm, not even a buzzkill, but his words appeal to the iPhone jailbreak generation more than Elon Musk. They hold him as a genius that can do anything for to liberate the people while Tesla is yet another Big Corp. that ask too much for false value. Proof: someone just said he did it in his garage.

So kudos to him for making Tesla react, yes they were a bit needy, but they had to realign things a bit.

Not to mention disclosing presumably sensitive correspondence to the reporter. If I were Elon I'm not sure I'd be too happy about that.

And that would be OK. He doesn't have a PR department.

The original article paints Hotz as brilliant, arrogant and reckless, the archetypal young hero, as what writers often do to make the story interesting.

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.

Yeah, I don't really understand the point they are trying to make there. Of course Geohot does not have a massive amount of engineers working on his car, and it's not meant to be a mass-market product, it's just a hobbyist project built in his garage, it's already amazing it worked so well to be honest regarding the massive complexity of a project like this. Unless I misunderstood something...

It's not just meant to be a hobbyist project. From the original story:

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.”

That's a bit of a trend on the Tesla blog. You saw the same thing with all the excitement about range anxiety and journalist tracking and such. I agree that it doesn't play too well for them, but ultimately I would buy a car based on the car, not the defensiveness of the company or lack thereof... so perhaps it's a case of no such thing as bad publicity; they know responding will likely get them some press, so might as well.

This is just a press release to keep stakeholder value and their relation with MobileEye. Nothing to see here.

Stakeholders do not really care if Hotz say that and Musk said what. They just want to know their money is being spent correctly.

I am too getting negative vibe from the Tesla comment. Even though all they said is true. Maybe it's because they start with telling how improbable in their opinion is that someone other then google could beat them in any shape or form.

Would you buy a system like that from a guy? I wouldn't and I'd feel uncomfortable, just like I am around poor drivers, if I knowingly encountered one on the roads.

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.")

This piece is really well written in an accessible style. It's even more clear than the original article, and does a great job of sounding genuinely kind to all parties (except maybe the journalist, who will be prepared for it).

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.

I applaud George Hotz, will be cool to see what the end product will be like. Tesla seems pretty sure of themselves that he will fail, but I hope he'll prove them wrong.

This is more of a getting the facts straight than Hotz is gonna fail article. It's more like if Hotz is not gonna scale and stay by himself, he won't be able to compete.

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.

Hotz is a talented hacker. Tesla isn't into hacking. As pointed out in another thread, Tesla has engineering processes in place to finish off that pesky final 20% that seems to drag on forever... I am certain that Geohotz will get sick of this project and move on to something new once the hacking part is over and the hard part begins.

I'm a hacker too, so I can relate a lot. Hotz isn't the kind of person to start something and not finish it, esp after all this press..there's pressure now, I can def see the entrepreneurial side in him.

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)

I think the series of < 6 month stints at various jobs indicates he's comfortable changing direction early if he's not happy with the situation. But it does seem likely that press like this will provide access to funding that a skilled operator could turn into a mature product.

Jobs are jobs. They come and go.

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.

I also am rooting for the underdog. But the fact of the matter is, once a non-human component is found at fault for a fatal accident, it'll likely set the field back a few years. It's not about betting that he will fail, it's more about doubting that he can achieve the level of safety, by himself.

Given that in the US there is literally no level of safety which will satisfy even 90% of people, it's useful to have a bite-size entrant who can move fast and fail if needed.

I think they're more concerned that he might almost succeed.

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 am more surprised that Tesla did not make a point of saying 'Elon Musk did not encourage George Hotz to play fast and loose on San Francisco highways to win a bet' and 'there is no formal financial relationship between Tesla and geohot'.

In addition to the substantive points raised by other commenters, the context is notable. The Geohot story was written by Ashley Vance, author of an unauthorized Elon Musk biography and with whom Musk and Tesla have had prior disagreements. That may influence the degree to which a rebuttal may be felt necessary, and the tone chosen for the rebuttal.

Source? AFAIK Vance's biography was authorized and they're on good terms.

>We should also clarify that Tesla’s autopilot system was designed and developed in-house.

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.

I just read the associated article [1] and somehow, despite the fact that I've understood that neural networks and deep learning have been coming for years, it has caused some kind of explosion in my brain - like this is all coming true quicker than I thought. What struck me in particular was the notion that physical work has been revolutionised and now thought-based work will be revolutionised - removing from large chunks of humanity that must fundamental of needs - something to frantically do all day.

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...

I had similar thoughts after reading the associated article: is there a series of MOOCs one can take to learn what Hotz learned (or at least a fraction of it)?

An unusually poor PR mis-step from Tesla with an ill-judged tone. It is equally possible to make exactly the same points by congratulating the lone hacker for what he has managed to achieve by himself and then lead the reader through the extraordinary areas of innovation that Tesla has achieved in housed and the challenges that Hotz may yet find himself facing.

"Congratulations to him, he is right, anyone can create what we've done. But let us show you, reader that has already stopped reading, how he is wrong."

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.

I'm usually supportive of Tesla in their righteous crusade, but even they have to realize that they can't be using MobilEye forever, right?

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.

It's so obvious MobileEye asked them to right this. The original article had Elon quoted saying that he would give him a multi million dollar bonus once they drop MobileEye. Unless that quote was falsely attributed to Elon I'm pretty sure the original article was correct and MobileEye was bummed. https://i.imgur.com/4gdCzKj.png

It's a terribly sourced article, so I personally don't blame them for responding in the way they did. He's an extremely gifted developer, but from the title down (he wasn't the first one to "hack" the iPhone) it's factually wrong on many levels. This reeks of a reporter who's either a fan boy or has an axe to grind with Tesla.

Why respond? You really think Google [or self-respecting company] would dignify some random person one-upping their self-driving initiative with an official blog post? Seriously? Elon Musk's hair-transplant-insecurity is a strong one.

Anything can be said and PRed, the only thing that matters is results, and only a real world contest will prove who's who. But I'm still wondering about the objectivity of the original article, does 2k locs written by geohot really beats the systems existing today? Or is that kind of a high level code in top of something else not mentioned in the article, I'd rather think of that second possibility.

What gets me puzzled about this article is an angle pointed out by a journalist (I forget whom now): how on earth do you rationalize "correcting" an article written by someone else? It is unusual and borderline impolite.

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I support geohots

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