Tesla Autonomy Day
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited both as a primary source on Tesla's technical autonomy approach and, later, for Musk's unmet robotaxi predictions.
What it is
Tesla's roughly four-hour Autonomy Day investor event covers its in-house self-driving chip, vision-only approach, fleet data engine and robotaxi plans, with talks by Andrej Karpathy and others.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends furriephillips · 2019-05 · on “The investor who turned down Uber at a $5m valuation”
After the recent "Tesla Autonomy Day" video [this video] (almost 4h long, but worth a watch), I do rather feel like the incumbent services are about to be in a spot of bother. I think there's a bubble in this sector, and it's going to pop.
Recommends antpls · 2019-11 · on “Andrej Karpathy talks about how Tesla's NNs are structured and trained [video]”
Watch the presentation from 6 months ago, where they explain the decision to build their own hardware for inferring : [this video] It's not surprising that they also build the hardware for training. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Google use the same TPUs for training and inference, because the underlying operations are the same : multiply then add numbers. Once Tesla built the hardware for inferring, the design of the hardware for training is probably similar. Unlike Google's TPUs, Tesla have a specific use case for the hardware (computer vision for automotive), and maybe than means they can further optimize the computation pipeline with their own specialized hardware.
Recommends fossuser · 2020-08 · on “Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-Lidar stance”
I heard from a tesla engineer that they do use lidar to train their models, but that they don’t see the value in deploying it to the fleet. It’s worth watching the tesla event from about a year ago if you haven’t seen it for their full position: [this video] The quick notes are that our roads are set up for human vision and a truly capable level 5 system will require human level interpretation of visual data (at which point lidar becomes redundant). He thinks lidar with non human level visual interpretation won’t get us to full autonomy. They see lidar as a short term half measure, a local maximum that’s a distraction from what has to get done anyway.
Cites natch · 2019-05 · on “Tesla sued in wrongful death lawsuit that alleges Autopilot caused crash”
Based on what Tesla presented in their autonomy day event ( [this video] ) but it's also what they've been saying publicly for a while now... in a nutshell, they ask the cars to send selected summary data back when interventions happen and in certain other cases.
Cites studentrob · 2019-05 · on “Tesla is raising up to $1.5B through convertible note and share sale”
How can they spend all the money on autonomy [1] while refusing to share any more data [2] beyond the couple of sentences in their "safety reports" [3]? This makes no sense. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
Cites ghufran_syed · 2019-06 · on “Study: Tesla Autopilot misleading, overestimated more than similar technology”
I was worried about the “diffusion of responsibility” issue, so I rented one on Turo for the day and drove around 200 miles on freeways in Northern California. The user interface is really good, you learn pretty quickly the right amount of force to hold the wheel - then you can let it “autosteer”, but taking control is instantaneous, you just make the movement you want and the car disengages autosteer instantly. I probably took over from the car around 10 times that day, mainly in the left-hand lane with the left edge of the freeway marked with 2-foot-high white concrete barriers, it felt like it wanted to go into them. But that might just have been the car trying to drive “properly” in the
Cites daryas · 2019-07 · on “Tesla Q2 2019 Letter”
> They don't want engineers testing code out on real people's lives. When Tesla pushes and runs code in the shadow mode, it is run in parallel to the "production" version of the software. The actual behavior of a car, even with the test code in, still relies on decisions made by the "production" version of the software[1]. The purpose of such testing is to compare decisions made by the updated code vs those made by the old version, and use this info for fine-tuning the next gen algorithms. [1] [this video]
Cites kjksf · 2019-08 · on “Contrary to Musk's claim, Lidar has some advantages in Self Driving technology”
Actually, they did mention radar during Autonomy Investor Day ( [this video] ). Also, [LINK] says: "A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength that is able to see through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead." So it's rather bizarre that you would speculate about how they're not using radar when they explicitly say they do.