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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

I am not surprised that comma is still around.

Minimal VC funding, less than 100 employees, not outrageously increasing headcount each month, profitable and sells a product with good margins.

Not many startups do this anymore, they are just chasing funding every 3 months using OpenAI’s API, comma has their own models before the AI hype.

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It’s cool to see that it’s possible to innovate sustainably, in a niche. So refreshing to see something stick around rather than become a bubble with a billion dollar valuation that either takes over the world and enshittifies or implodes and takes the product with it.

Make business chill.

That said: The larger they get, the more regulator attention they’ll attract. If some government entity wanted to, they could probably easily kill them.

kill the company, probably, but the source is MIT and there doesn't appear to be any copyright assignment, so no rug pull

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/v0.9.7/LICENSE

https://github.com/commaai/panda/blob/32eecd721129b9215030c5...

IIRC the actual model is private and only downloads once you activate the device so presumably if the company was shutdown you couldn’t use the device anymore unless someone shelled out for training

Makes sense. Given what I have seen of geohot's personality, I would bet dollars to donuts that he'd post a link to it in such an outcome

I'm inclined to say the model is open because I've seen PRs that just update the various models

For those similarly curious, I went sniffing around the PRs and found that, yes, there are two .onnx (via git-lfs) in https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/v0.9.7/selfdrive/m... - one for the forward camera and one for watching the driver. The driver one had a lot more features than I expected, but I'd guess they are related to the NTSB certification I saw mentioned elsewhere in the thread here. Regrettably, because I don't have a Panda-compatible car, I actually can't try out the self-hosting setup but it certainly seems plausible

Also, while poking around, I saw they use a "CTF" for on-boarding new contributors, which I thought was neat: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/v0.9.7/tools/CTF.m...

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