Comma.ai will ship a $999 autonomous driving add-on by the end of this year
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Mountain View to San Francisco
He gives the full talk here:
https://techcrunch.com/video/george-geohot-hotz-presents-the...
Yes, he's a punk and seemingly on drugs, but surprisingly, Hotz is not a bullshitter as far as I can tell.
What makes you say this?
I like George Hotz, but I was attempting to preempt anyone who might dismiss his substance because they don't like his style.
The dangerous kind of not-really-autonomous.
I.e, I can install a radar detector, but no way will I be able to sue the manufacturer if I get a ticket.
This isn't just a minimum viable product, it's a minimum liability product.
If you start tampering with the hardware of the car to splice in this box, will your insurance cover even in normal situations?
What mostly bothers me about this is his disregard to whether someone dies or not using the product. But hey, as long as they're shipping this year, under $1000, that's all that matters right?
I've read their paper and it's solid ML research, he's got a few good guys on the team. And I don't really disagree about MobilEye. But there are so many other DL/RL product spaces they could have picked without risking people's lives - it kind of seems he is on a mission to prove Musk and some other companies wrong, no matter what the risks to users. I sincerely hope no one dies as a result of using this.
However, I think that difference between 90% and 99.99999% is crucial, and that boils down to the quality of the software and hardware, and the amount of testing. I find it irresponsible to beta test a product on users when there is a very real chance of something going wrong and people dying or getting injured.
https://electrek.co/2016/09/14/another-fatal-tesla-autopilot...
"Inexpensive off-the-shelf electronics" aren't rated for automotive environmental conditions, nor do they have the immunity to interference (e.g., single event upsets) required for safety-critical systems.
So you could basically deploy this as software only, on recent 820 based smartphones? Just need a fish eye lens attachment and CAN bus to USB cable (or USB OTG GPIO)
I am not gonna lie - that does not give me a lot of confidence in this system. "Oh, and by the way, it sometimes doesn't brake when it should." That quickly equals injury or even death with a car. You do not want to move fast and break things with your car.
But if there was ever a case for a "business guy" to be involved with a pitch this was it.
His messaging works at some level - "I'm shipping something REAL and SMALL and ACHIEVABLE"
But his pitch has two huge problems:
(a) The delivery is rough. He comes across as patronizing and manic. I want to put my life in his hands?
(b) He fumbles (like Musk has) with the difference between his pitch "Mountain View to San Francisco without touching the wheel" and the reality "It is fully functional. It’s about on par with Tesla Autopilot"
Lots of potential in the product but for me this pitch diminished the chances that I'd ever own the device.
Wait, Hotz, that name... is this Geohot?
...
Turns out, it is! [1] That makes this statement a lot more believable to me.
Moreover, some of his comments make me distrust his judgement. Just from a CNN article this year:
> "For awhile, I thought it was going to be incredibly difficult to contribute," he said. In January 2015, he started working as a researcher at Vicarious, a company that's building artificial intelligence algorithms. "I started reading all the papers. I thought, 'This stuff isn't that hard. This isn't ultra sophisticated. This is basic,'" he said. Moreover, "the mistakes people are making are basic."
> "I started to look around at the other players. These people are noobs," he said.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/04/technology/george-hotz-comma...
And this pitch certainly works for those type of people.
“It is fully functional. It’s about on par with Tesla
Autopilot,” Hotz said. It doesn’t have a lot of sensors
as the Comma One relies on built-in car front radars and
comes with a camera.
I am fairly confident that self-driving will proliferate a feature offered by the automaker at the time of purchase, just as adaptive cruise control and lane assist is becoming commonplace right now. It may be difficult to convince an average consumer to rig up a device in their car that isn't supported by their automaker.
Even with those systems working exactly as designed, there are some serious liability questions I don't think anyone has really answered yet.
How would it do that though? I'm still going to take my car to work, except that it will do all the driving. Unless you are talking about theoretical, far off in the future idea that we will remove all traffic lights and speed limits because autonomous cars will handle intersections and speeds much better than humans?
fixed typo
I was just questioning the wisdom of passing out the free headline tragedy-puns with your branding. It would be an equally terribly name for a line of DIY transcranial direct current stimulation kits. Again, it's not because these products are dangerous[0], but that they will likely be perceived that way. Any possible blame will be laid at their feet at least through innuendo, so why make it easy and catchy?
[0] I make no assertion about the actual safety of either.
Does the NHTSA do any testing for products like this? I'm usually not big on government regulation, but there definitely needs to be some kind of regulation and oversight for this kind of thing.
I think they will get somewhere, if not in self driving cars then something else to do with machine learning.
"In the pics directory, you'll find 5 short "videos" with 10 frames each of driving the same set of road. Different cars, different mountings, etc...
Your goal, write a program to localize them all with respect to each other in 3 space.
Deliver a 3-D map of the location and orientation of all pictures."
Very cool!
I mean what they have done to you? It's not like they gonna sell tickets to Hell or scam someone, so what's the big deal with more entrepreneurship in the town?? Be nice to your fellow entrepreneurship -- you might end up working for them one day.
Apparent reckless use of technology frightens people, regardless of the actual risk.
As engineers / technologists / experts, we have a duty as a community to ensure our products are safe!
Of course, end users also have a duty to ensure they use our products responsibly -- but the whole point of autonomous vehicles is that the end user has no control. They are entrusting their safety to the product.
The situations are in no way comparable.
That difference is engineering, and we undervalue it at our peril.
What happens when the knife cuts you? :-)
Interesting that they're talking about California driving. In an episode of Bloomberg's Hello World I saw recently, Hotz actually demonstrated his self driving car in Nevada. They mentioned that the state of California asked him to stop driving on the public roads.
Regulations ahoy!
Hopefully sane legislation will prevail and end this madness soon.
Most accidents occur due to distracted drivers. A self braking car preventing drivers from rear ending other cars can easily be justified as a good investment. Having something like this to "upgrade" any car to a better safety system makes more sense to me from a marketing standpoint.
Also avoiding liability.
With that comment you probably mean the inherent difference of the Tesla/Hotz/German style of live online interpretation of the world, compared to the inferior Google style offline collected Google maps, where the SW matches the view with the offline world. Because in the Google world you cannot drive a street which is not in the system. The Google system is not advanced enough to interpret changed speed signs, changed roads, temporary road contruction, ...
The price is extremely low. If you drive just 20 minutes per day, and your time is worth at least minimum wage, it makes sense to buy this for just a year, and hopefully it lasts longer than that. But there is a monthly subscription cost ($300 per year) i didn't factor in. And wtf, since when does hardware have a subscription cost? Oh, and to purchase one you need to have lots of "points" with the company, which you can earn by using their app. This is really weird, why not just raise the price if you can't meet demand?
The price also doesn't seem high enough to cover the risk. If each accident costs 10 million in lawsuits (i have no idea how much they will actually cost, but that seems like a good made up number, and corporate legal fees are expensive anyway) then they better have less than 1 accident per 10,000 vehicles that use it, just to break even. honestly i hope they have 0 accidents because they could bring in regulators and ruin the fun for everyone, as well as the very delicate reputation of self driving cars (people are already predisposed to distrust machines)
I can't believe this works at all. Wouldn't you need like multiple gpus to process all this camera data in real time? How do you account for the variance between vehicles? How many cameras do they have and what is the resolution? That unit looks really small.
It looks like it's just trained by predicting what a human would do. Human drivers are imperfect, and so I imagine this machine will learn to imitate the imperfections of human drivers, combined with it's own imperfections. It's also unclear how they trained it, because the dash cam videos don't give information on when users tapped the brakes or moved the steering wheel. They must be doing some interesting semi-supervised learning.
Apparently the cars have limits on how hard it can slam on the brakes or turn the wheel. He advertises this as a good thing that will prevent the AI from doing anything too bad, but I don't see how. This limits what the AI can do in a real emergency. Worse, it suggests that the AI needs these training wheels. That without them it would cause accidents, and that's very concerning.
I just can't believe that this works. Deep learning is completely amazing and can get 99% accuracy, but this requires 99.9999%. Those extra 9's are super super hard. Fortunately this doesn't need to be perfect, it only needs to be better than humans. And while deep learning is starting to beat humans in some machine vision tasks, I'm not confident this is true in general. In the real world there will be weird edge cases, like a car painted in a very atypical pattern, or ice on the road, or a bug on the windshield, etc. Humans are more capable of handling new, out of sample situations, and machines can fail epically at them.
Well there is a pretty important software component and I'd guess that this allows them to fund ongoing development of that and give you regular updates (this is a pretty early version so I'd imagine at least monthly software updates after purchase).
> Wouldn't you need like multiple gpus to process all this camera data in real time
Hotz demoed an early prototype on the road in Nevada to a reporter months ago that was wired up to a single Ubuntu-Linux powered laptop if I remember correctly so I'm assuming probably just 1 integrated GPU required.