It might be Elon who went and said that and said they don’t need lidar, but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
That I also want to know. He bailed out of Tesla right when the limitations of his "LIDAR-less cameras only self driving" system were becoming obvious, and nobody asked him about the hindsight of this obvious fuckup.
>but as director of AI and auto vision Karpathy bears the responsibility for those features.
Exactly. You lead the R&D, so it's on you. If your boss makes stupid decisions in public overriding your best judgement, the leave and go somewhere where your decisions be respected. The ML market was red hot for people like him back then so it's not like he didn't have alternatives.
Although I doubt Elon forced that idea on him, since he's the one who was confidently claiming that vision only is better since Lidar pollutes the sensor fusion data.
Elon makes it so easy to hate him as much as to admire. No comparison.
IDK but if I judge a head of ML, I'd care more about whether he has delivered technically, not if he's good at PR.
The ZIRP era lead to SV ML scene to be full of false prophets who were just good at PR and advertising for their employer because they were popular with the industry hype, than at actually getting shit that works delivered out the door.
It's good that the money and hype bubbles bursts every now and then as only then are the scammers, false gods, and naked emperors revealed and can the house get cleaned of them.
Did he never experienced optical illusions? I don't get it.
How do you get a labeled dataset for your ML model? Obviously you use lidar, except the engineers had to do it in secret because Elon has fired engineers that used lidar even during the development process.
> it was at the time nowhere near sufficient to to deliver L4 autonomy
Truth is what they did was impressive, but given their constraints, but the constraints were self-imposed and unnecessary. So it's more impressive in the way that it is impressive when someone that was shot crawled their way to the hospital. Still impressive even if they shot themselves, but it sure does make you feel a little different...
The Woz was on TV in an interview saying he bought 2 Model 3s, one for himself and one he could put to work after the robotaxi update. Regular everyday suckers too were taking on crippling debt to buy Teslas because their cars were gonna pay for themselves after the magical update.