[paragpatelone]

"His self-funded experiment could end with Hotz humbly going back to knock on Google’s door for a job."

The biggest thing here IMO is this is self-funded. Any startup trying to do what he is doing in this environment would have raised $50 Million, hired 100's of engineers from top notch schools, become accepted in YC, and have Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, Sam Altman and all singing their praises.

Kudos to him for being self-funded.

[mnglkhn2]

Could not help thinking about the stark contrast between Hotz and the Theranos "entrepreneur": a. self-funded vs. VC friend funded b. demo-ing the product (try it and 'feel' it) early on vs. hiding behind a ton of marketing legalese

[jonknee]

The funny thing is he's the type of person you'd want to put your VC behind.

[jamesjyu]

And yes, that happened http://www.getcruise.com/

[tim333]

Ta - I was trying to remember who the YC startup were trying the same stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933045

Seems they recently raised $15m http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/18/cruise-2/

Wonder how they compare tech wise to Geohot's thing

[dangerpowpow]

what's with making text so thin you can't even read?

[proksoup]

I hope the design was originally with a different image. And then the image was changed, and it wasn't redesigned.

[raisedbyninjas]

The text that isn't overlaying images is terrible too. It's too thin for subpixel rendering to look decent. There's not enough contrast for viewing on a TN LCD panel unless it's in the middle of the screen.

[hodwik]

p { font-weight: 100; }

[azinman2]

Oi. This is not the kind of thing I want kickstarted.

I'd prefer my autonomous cars to have gone through insane amounts of testing, regulation, etc. This is just too new of a field, and the amount of edge cases you have to handle is practically infinite.

[puranjay]

While I understand where you're coming from, and even feel emotionally invested in the idea of bootstrapping, objectively speaking, it's a bad decision to stay self-funded. It is, after all, a business, and if you can accelerate your business' growth 100x by taking on some very smart outside investors and hire very smart people, why wouldn't you?

[btilly]

You might not because the goals of a founder and an investor are different.

Investors know that their returns are generated by a handful of super-successful companies. And so they have a natural pressure to "swing for the fences".

Founders have a tremendous amount tied up in THIS company, and are naturally risk-adverse.

So you get conflicts like the following. There is an initiative which has 20% chance of losing everything, but could double how much you make. Investors will always want to go for it. Founders reasonably may not.

[iphone7166]

A typical woodhead's thought. "Accelerate your business's growth". Hahaha. Hard things have to be done solo because explaining to others is slowwwwwwww.

[AndrewKemendo]

Hard things have to be done solo because explaining to others is slowwwwwwww.

A million times this. I never really understood how hard it was to explain a (in my mind) simple new technology to the lay person until I had to do it. This is even after spending years as a technical briefer for high power executives.

[iphone7166]

What I was meaning is actually not about external investors or so. My point is, sometimes even putting more equally competent technical collaborators won't work; it's like digging a tunnel: the working surface is only that wide, an extra worker can do little more than staring at the working man's ass.

[zymhan]

Because if all of that will distract you from actually developing the product. Granted this won't work for most people, but if you're extremely talented like geohot then it may not be a bad call.

[ffn]

Because creating a self-driving car is an extremely creativity-intensive exercise that demands "smartness"... but smartness doesn't add linearly (or, I could posit even monotonically). If 1 smart guy can produce 1 self-driving car in say 6 months, it doesn't mean 2 smart guys can produce a self-driving in 3 months. Once you have a bunch of people, 2nd order and third order interactions between us get complicated and managing that becomes its own time/money-sink.

As for money, yes, it can accelerate growth in its first-order effect; but it also induces stress and so threatens early exhaustion of your other precious resource: personal motivation.

So, as a crack-shot programmer, if you know with 90% certainty you can crank out a self-driving car in 6 months by yourself or fail, but only 20% certainty you can arrange a cohesive team with someone else's money to crank out a car in 1 month or fail (and alienate your team, and ruin your credit)... I would advise taking the 6 months route. Patience is a virtue and sometimes it's better not buying into every pot of snake-oil the SV hype machine wants to sell us.

[bgp]

Creating 1 job is better than hundreds?

[eterpstra]

Well, Hotz did state that, “The truth is that work as we know it in its modern form has not been around that long, and I kind of want to use AI to abolish it. I want to take everyone’s jobs. Most people would be happy with that, especially the ones who don’t like their jobs. Let’s free them of mental tedium and push that to machines. In the next 10 years, you’ll see a big segment of the human labor force fall away. In 25 years, AI will be able to do almost everything a human can do. The last people with jobs will be AI programmers.”

[zxcvbnmmnbvcxz]

Yeah and the world will split in rich and poor people with poor starving.

[noir_lord]

What interests me about your argument is the assumption that the "poor starving" will just sit by and passively accept that.

The reason we don't have an insurrection on our hands now about wealth disparity is that while the wealth of the super wealthy has accelerated hugely so has the general living standard of the poor, if (when) the jobs go away that will no longer be the case and then you are talking about a brutal escalation into a full insurrection and while the technology and wealth will be on one side, the last 15 years in the middle east has shown what committed people with pickups and AK's can do against an on-paper massively superior opponent.

I just hope the super wealthy are smart enough to see this coming and avoid it, it would be spectacularly brutal.

[frame_perfect]

Or nobody will ever have to work again.

[samstave]

Bullshit.

It's a nice dream, but the idea of AI and robots doing dishes, picking strawberries, washing cars, cooking meals will never happen.

The best AI cannot beat a population of Mexicans who are basically the glue that holds out modern society together.

If you wanted to see how the U.S. Will completely come to a screeching halt, it would be if the rapture took place and only claimed all Mexicans.

Our entire way of life depends on them. AI will never replace them.

[noir_lord]

Once our entire agricultural system (here in the UK) was dependent on manual farm labourers, now we grow 60% of the calories we consume with 1.6% of the workforce.

> It's a nice dream, but the idea of AI and robots doing dishes, picking strawberries, washing cars, cooking meals will never happen.

If something can be automated at a lower cost than paying wages it eventually will be, automation is coming (arguably has been here since the industrial revolution) and it's not stopped yet.

[samstave]

http://www.foodchainsfilm.com/

Watch this - and tell me whats cheaper, robots or mexican slaves.

[jMyles]

In a word, yes.

"Jobs" are not an end in themselves, and are decreasingly relevant in the information age.

[forgotpasswd3x]

Is this less impressive to you because he didn't 'create jobs'?

[free2rhyme214]

Self-funding this experiment is probably harder than creating 100 jobs.

[ignoramous]

I think his/her point is that just because the usual suspects aren't backing this venture, there's lot of negativity about the project here on HN.

Like Palmer Luckey of Oculus VR, I hope G Hotz has a similar story to tell at the end of it all.