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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

Andrej Karpathy just started working on Tesla's software 2 years ago, before what Chris Lattner did was a mess (he wanted to just have 1 task that learns magically everything), Andrej had to start everything from scratch.

Waymo had a 20 year advantage, but Google lost many key people there in the meantime as Larry Page didn't want to launch partial self driving.

I think both approaches are great and I wouldn't want to choose between the 2, just be a happy user of the end result of the competition.

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> before what Chris Lattner did was a mess (he wanted to just have 1 task that learns magically everything), Andrej had to start everything from scratch

any source for that?

Sorry, I can't find the source, I'm reading Elektrek all the time and often there are people in the comments section with knowledge about what happens inside Tesla.

> Larry Page didn't want to launch partial self driving

That's the responsible thing to do.

It’s just that Google is a much larger target for negative PR response than any of the other companies.

If you look at self driving automation as a black box, sure.

But at the same time people understand that on a highway Tesla Autopilot is safe enough to be used on a long boring road, and dricers generally feel less tired (and can focus more on the harder parts of the road).

There have been notable Tesla fatalities on "long boring roads". The software has a long way to go..

Ah yes,the story of Tesla: everything yesterday was crap,but everything tomorrow will be awesome.

Did you really follow how drivers reacted to the changes before/after Karpathy came there? People were extremely dissatisfied with the first versions of Autopilot 2 (as it was worse than Autopilot 1 when it appeared), but it improved a lot, and now it's definitely better.

I recall everyone saying Tesla "FSD" was awesome and industry leading, I see them saying that today, and I expect they'll be telling their grandchildren the same while being driven around in a Waymo.

In all seriousness, I like Karpathy and his work. Seems like a good guy. Not sure why you'd want to work to enrich a guy like Elon Musk though.

> Not sure why you'd want to work to enrich a guy like Elon Musk though

If you look at the alternative (Dieselgate), which is killing millions of people every year thanks to air pollution (sadly I'm highly affected by it, trying to not go near any polluted area is what my life is about at an age of 37), I'm happy for Elon Musk and I hope Tesla's mission will succeed as soon as it is possible.

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