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Comment by nlowell | Hacker News Reader

Karpathy's videos (and blogs) are excellent. I wonder how history will reflect on his time at Tesla, however.

What do you mean by "however"? He built the entire FSD architecture - in less time and with fewer people than Google, Apple, and god knows who else. He's likely saved more lives than most doctors at this point...

No he didn't, a (large from what I hear) team did. However Karpathy is still a smart, well accomplished, guy and he has a talent many academics don't: being able to write actual production grade, high quality software. And he's a good communicator.

It's probably a reaction to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415413

which I'm sure was more a marketing error than anything else.

> likely saved more lives than most doctors at this point

Care to elaborate on this ridiculous claim?

What's ridiculous about stats? A Tesla with autopilot or FSD is more than 10x less likely to be in a collision, based on various US agencies stats. Average chance of collision is 1 in 366 for every 1000 miles driven. Something like 1 in 20000 of those result in fatalities. Now, take millions of Teslas equipped with any assisted-driving tech, multiply by miles driven, include the above averages, and divide by ten. Doctors would be jelly.

Perhaps you can elaborate on what strikes you as ridiculous about fairly straightforward stats? Surprised to see you on a ML thread...

Can you cite "various US agencies stats"? I say this as someone who used FSD Beta for a full year and Autopilot (with Navigate on Autopilot) for over 3 years now. It would actually help the conversation here to cite it, though I never knew third-parties evaluated Tesla's claims/statistics.

There's also a strong selection bias to a bulk stat like the one parent mentioned. Teslas are expensive cars and I'm guessing their drivers are likely to be older, more affluent, and more educated that average - this all correlates to lower accidents/fatalities regardless of FSD[1][2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24103823/

[2] https://personalinjurylawyersaustintx.com/blog/education-lev...

You are absolutely correct - Tesla's own report acknowledges this, but it also highlights how this safety stat is dwarfed when autopilot is active: https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/delivery/public/image/tesla/5f93...

Reference: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

Millions of Teslas equipped with ‘any assisted-driving tech’ != autopilot on FSD. We have to compare deaths in Teslas with deaths in other vehicles too, as that’s what people would use if not a Tesla.

The chance of fatality per collision is way off.

If you’re going to go down a rabbit hole we need to look at lives impacted by lithium mining compared to regular combustion engine vehicles.

While I appreciate your point I’d be surprised if the number of QALYs is higher from working on FSD at Tesla compared to being a doctor.

You're probably right that fatalities per collision is off but plug in your own numbers and then divide by ten... the point still stands. Autopilot has saved countless lives. And it was architected by a very small team, led by this one man. But I'll admit, the comparison with doctors is a little hyperbolic. Although in a few years of growth and global scale, who knows...?

Tesla kick started the global EV revolution, so probably favorably regardless of the few negatives that inherently come along the way.

As if history will care?

The history AI will have an opinion that mirrors the politics of the user that asks it what it thinks of Karpathy’s time at Tesla.

Only in the default bubble mode.

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