[_coveredInBees]

I dunno, self-driving is an interesting computer-vision / machine-learning problem and it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on. For anyone working in the field, the end goal is extremely rewarding in terms of the long-term beneficial impact on society it would have and the numerous lives it would save.

I don't think Tesla is going to drop FSD R&D anytime soon. They've also built out amazing software infrastructure under Karpathy's leadership to make use of their fleet of hundreds of thousands of cars to run shadow experiments with newer models in the background and continuously collect more difficult and interesting training data so they can improve their models and their internal test-sets for tracking metrics. They are also a relatively lean team from what I've heard, so it's not like they are bankrolling hundreds of very expensive ML PhDs at the moment. It is debatable if they (or anyone else) will "solve" FSD with current approaches, but I think the technology is already pretty fascinating and useful.

[shaan7]

> it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on

Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

[Graffur]

Are they really the 'best' minds if that is what they choose to do? Not in my opinion.

[mattkrause]

That's not really fair.

If you want to do fundamental research, the jobs are very scarce and, in many cases, not particularly good in terms of salary, stability, or location. A postdoc in the life sciences makes $50-65k/year, often either in a) a high cost-of-living area (Boston, SF) or b) a land-grant institution in the middle of nowhere, which is tough with a partner. These are usually short contracts too--mine is renewed annually. Faculty and Pharma jobs pay better, obviously, but are also pretty thin on the ground.

I like doing research that makes the world better, but doing so is an incredible luxury, even coming from a decently middle-class background. If my family were even slightly poorer, there's no way this would be possible and if one of them were to get sick or hurt, I can't imagine how I'd be able to stick it out.

It doesn't have to be this way, obviously. We could fund more stable positions--and I think it'd probably work out to more/better science per dollar spent. But right now...we definitely don't.

[piva00]

I'd change "the best minds" to the "some of the most educated and technically prepared minds".

And it's not only to click ads, there is a whole lot of engineers (even more in poorer countries such as Brazil) who end up working in banks and finance, mostly to deal with complex spreadsheets.

It's a complete waste of educational investment.

[MperorM]

Spreadsheets and finance has tremendous value!

[nickalaso]

If by "best" we mean, most educated, most capable of solving engineering problems, "highest IQ" etc. (Which is how we generally define best in this context) Then yes.

There used to be a big incentive for the smart scientific and engineering minded types to go into academia, but now the majority go into either financial services or tech work because that is where the high salaries and actual problem solving are.

[hoppyhoppy2]

I read the "best minds of my generation" comment as a reference to the opening line of Howl by Allen Ginsburg. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

Though I don't know if it was an intentional reference or just a coincidence.

[w0de0]

Of course it was an intentional reference! The meat of the meaning is in the reference, not the plain words!

[hoseja]

Well, the idea is that they demand the highest salary and those who pay the highest salary are companies interested in improving ad-clicking. It's not "abstractly best" but "empirically best". If you get the most money, you are by some definition the best.

[p1esk]

The companies might be interested in add clicking, but they are willing to hire extraordinary people who work on whatever they feel like.

[wyre]

I think their described as ‘best’ minds because they graduated top of their class at Ivy League, leading California school, etc.

[gtt]

It is the society failing them by not setting the right priorities.

[zitterbewegung]

But, indirectly it becomes an interesting problem (nlp research). If we didn't have people playing / making video games then we wouldn't have figured out GPU acceleration to use with deep networks (backpropagation is fast when you can do matrix multiplication fast).

[devonkim]

I’ve heard it also as “making global scale dopamine delivery systems” when bringing in social media KPIs and other addiction-driven engagement like modern gaming monetization models

[GuB-42]

> Yup. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

That's better than when the best minds are thinking about how to kill people.

Anyways, it is a good thing that even if the end goal is far from noble, most of the times, invest enough in R&D and positive things come out of it.

[an_opabinia]

On the other hand, “The average minds of my generation are thinking about Instagram.”

[wiz21c]

Yup double yup !

> numerous lives it would save

If you want to save lives, work on malnutrition, reducing coal energy, water access, basic vaccines, etc. You'll have a much greater impact.

[logicchains]

Globally around 1.3 million people are killed in motor accidents yearly and tens of millions more are permanently disabled (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...). In comparison there are around 0.4 million malaria deaths annually (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria). So eliminating motor accidents would save around 3x more lives than curing malaria.

[bildung]

This is indeed a problem, but Denmark's highways right now have 1/6 of the death rate of US highways, so if saving lives actually was the goal, AI isn't exactly the low hanging fruit.

[yarcob]

When I was in Sweden on vacation, I was surprised that almost all except the most minor roads have a central divider. To allow overtaking, they have 2+1 lanes, and then after a few km they switch to 1+2 lanes (extra lane in the other direction).

This eliminates the most deadly accidents (head on collisions) and makes overtaking completely stress free.

It's a simple intervention that you can do almost anywhere, and it saves lives immediately. You only need to invest a bit in concrete barriers and paint.

I wonder why almost no other country does that.

[bratcomplex]

they set standards for what a street, road, and highway are. and they do not mix them. As a result they are safer, cheaper, and land use has a higher tax revenue.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

[halikular]

Sweden has the lowest traffic related deaths of any country [1]. There must be something to it, however it's strange how lackluster the government response was to covid in comparison.

Edit: You think our covid restrictions was successful?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero#Outcomes

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I think it would be a lot easier to develop full self-driving than to get Americans to accept and implement the road safety measures that are in place in Denmark. And that's not even counting if there are cultural factors that make Danes better drivers other things being equal. I can't even imagine how many billions of dollars it would take.

[8fGTBjZxBcHq]

Cars won't save us from cars. Having widely available self driving car would save some lives but also set off another front in the culture wars and won't lead to significant changes in our infrastructure or how the burdens of mass driving are distributed.

The common point that you won't see huge structural improvements until human driven cars are gone is true and it's going to be a WHILE.

Even if you had perfect self driving technology the cultural and political capital you'd have to expend to get rid of recreational cars is just astronomical. At that point you may as well ban all of the fucking things, the electric ones aren't better they just shovel the suffering around a bit.

[piva00]

So it's easier for us to teach a computer to think than to teach people to think and act differently? Not sure if I agree with that statement, they require very different solutions, one is technical and the other social. I don't think just because the social solution is hard that it makes the technical one easier...

[LudwigNagasena]

What’s the point of comparing the US to countries that are as populous as the DC metro area? There are so many factors at play the comparison is completely meaningless.

[bildung]

Death rate is calculated as deaths per billion miles driven, so I don't see how the respective populations matter here. One could make the argument that population density is important to consider, but in the US the less populated states have higher death rates IIRC.

[h0l0cube]

> So eliminating motor accidents would save around 3x more lives than curing malaria.

Indeed, a worthwhile intervention. But when do you think Tesla will be auto-updating the FSD rickshaws in Liberia?

[fastball]

The faster it gets solved in the first market the faster it gets solved in the last, so the point stands.

[h0l0cube]

Not really. If you spend a dollar now on mosquito nets you might save a life. If you order a Tesla, you have yourself a fancy car that few people in the world can afford.

[FredPret]

There’s also the time spent not driving. That counts as part of a life saved for every commuter

[ploika]

You could also achieve this with a bus.

[wiz21c]

Don't understand why you're being downvoted. Really dunno.

[exdsq]

If we just look at deaths then sure, this could be right. However malaria is something we know how to tackle and isn’t that expensive. It’d be much more efficient to cure malaria than to eliminate all motor accidents.

[XorNot]

These are political problems, it's a different skillset.

[Graffur]

How can we get jobs in these areas or do you mean to start businesses in these areas?

[halfmatthalfcat]

I'm sure there will be a ton of residual effects from FSD. One off the top of my head being Emergency Services will be able to respond to emergencies faster because of minimized road congestion.

[scrose]

History has shown that when you make driving easier, people drive more.

[halfmatthalfcat]

And? Does that matter if we have better capacity/congestion planning because all the cars are self driving. There's so much wasted time in traffic and excess congestion because humans are at the wheel creating chaotic traffic fluctuations by their driving.

[scrose]

Yes. That does matter, a lot. Look up induced demand. Also consider that full-self driving will likely mean more cars on the road that don't even have a person in them.

Traffic backups and delays aren't just created from people crashing, it's because when you take a a dozen tiny humans and you put each of them in mostly > 15foot long cars, you now have 12 people managing to take up over 180 feet of space.

Speeding up emergency services is a solved problem. You take a lane that is filled with single-occupant vehicles, and you dedicate that to efficient forms of transit, whether it be a high-speed bus lane or a bike lane. Emergency services will not only opt to use that the majority of the time, they will also be less likely to crash with another vehicle due to not needing to weave lane to lane.

Hope this helps.

[p1esk]

Nope. The best minds work on whatever they're interested in (this includes making better ads):

https://ai.facebook.com/research

https://research.google/research-areas/

[ramraj07]

That’s definitely not true. The smartest (clearly not the best if you take conscience into account) minds of today work either in ad farms or as money movers. You can sugarcoat it however you want but if you work in google or Facebook you definitely are just farming ads but with extra steps.

[p1esk]

Hinton and Lecun are two of the smartest people working at Google/FB, and they don't work in ad farms or as money movers.

[8fGTBjZxBcHq]

Not directly but their work needs to benefit an ad company to be allowed to continue.

Or else it exists in some intersection of corporate benevolence and the work not actively harming the ad company. Which is just not an arrangement I trust sorry.

Plus I mean that's two people. How many people work at google and fb and how many who do get to decide they're going to do something more important than ads?

[p1esk]

how many who do get to decide

We are talking about "best minds of our generation". That means dozens.

But even a regular good engineer/researcher can probably find a place where they can work on something they're interested in. I did.

[DrAwdeOccarim]

Maybe in tech, but not in bio.

[PatentlyDC123]

Or nearly any other field, e.g., mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry/chemical engineering, nearly any of the sciences involved in the medical field (from pharmacology to psychology to name a few). Even "softer" fields like law and literature have present day geniuses pioneering new ground.

I understand that HackerNews is tech centered, but some times when I read "the best minds of my generation are doing X" I wonder if the commenter can see the flashes of brilliance shining beyond their field or what they know as "tech."

[DrAwdeOccarim]

Totally agree. I'm surprised I was downvoted for my comment?

[Emma_Goldman]

I just flicked through a few job ads on the career page of Google Research. All of them describe fundamental research oriented towards improving the commercial services of Google. It is very far from pursuing whatever one is interested in.

[p1esk]

If you are one of the smartest people on the planet, you can work on whatever you're interested in. You can, if you want to, work on fundamental research at Google without any direct connections to commercial services of Google. Just look at their publications.

[uncomputation]

> it is far more interesting than 90% of the stuff a lot of your FAANG companies are spending R&D dollars on

It’s not really about interesting for most people, it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this? I’m all for noble pursuits but don’t put down the trillion dollar smartphone, social media, PC markets that have long established themselves for the product we don’t even know is possible yet

[_coveredInBees]

> It’s not really about interesting for most people

This is an absolutely ludicrous statement. A very large number of people absolutely do prioritize what is interesting to them when it comes to their career. No one is going to be dirt poor, busking on the streets to make ends meet because they decided to work on self-driving tech. Nor is Tesla in any dire situation that they can't afford to fund their well-paid team of 20-25 ML engineers.

[emilgouliev]

> It’s not really about interesting for most people, it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this?

This is so asinine. Just because some R&D project is the most profitable thing FAANG companies can invest in doesn't mean it's actually the best allocation of resources for the people working on it.

Market fundamentalism is a brain disease.

[azangru]

> it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this?

I am sure Tesla employees can pay their mortgages.

[tachyonbeam]

I think Karpathy at Tesla has basically unlimited funding, Tesla is developing custom hardware. They've already deployed said hardware in the wild, and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving. We also don't know what his pay situation is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had multimillion dollar bonuses tied to various milestones. I know if I were Elon Musk, I wouldn't want to lose the guy.

So sure, he could leave, but to do what? To start building something similar from scratch somewhere else? He could go to Waymo to find that he went from being the project leader to an underling, and that Waymo is not using the approach he wants to use (he designed the Tesla project, and it's close to pure deep learning). IMO, unless something goes really wrong at Tesla, he will stay, because they're so close to success, surely he wants to see what happens, because the payout will be huge.

[ctvo]

> I think Karpathy at Tesla has basically unlimited funding,

Tesla's R&D spending in their earnings report was ~1.5 billion. That's a small number for unlimited. To contrast, their competitor at GM, with a significantly smaller market cap, is spending 6.2 billion.

> They've already deployed said hardware in the wild, and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving

Can you cite a source for this? Tesla is "probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving" is an absurd claim. Waymo publicly states they're at level 4 autonomy (https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1347286935535017986). Tesla states they're at level 2 autonomy (https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/tesla-full-self-driving-...).

[mdorazio]

> and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving

Absolutely no one actually working on the autonomous side of the automotive industry, myself included, believes this. Tesla is around the middle-bottom of the pack in terms of actual driverless operating capabilities. They're at the top of the pack only in marketing and reckless deployment before the tech is ready.

[tachyonbeam]

If you work for a competitor, you are clearly biased. Show us some evidence, some uncut videos of GM's Cruise or whoever besides Waymo you believe is ahead of Tesla.

[throwitawaybaby]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sliYTyRpRB8

[cma]

Waymo presumably also has custom AI hardware from their parent co. (TPUs). Also their own custom lidar hardware.

[tachyonbeam]

Are TPUs designed for low-power applications? You don't want to burn lots of power in an electric car.

[cma]

They have both high precision training TPUs and low-precision low-power edge-TPUs.

[fastball]

I'd actually say they're closer than Waymo to FSD, given that Waymo's solution relies on much more expensive tech and high fidelity 3D mapping. To my mind you're not true FSD until your car can drive literally anywhere an average human could, and I'm not sure that's possible with Waymo's solution until they've mapped the entire world.

[ra7]

You don’t get to be closer to FSD just because you have a grander vision of driving everywhere a human could. They have to actually demonstrate it. It’s been years and Tesla still doesn’t have the confidence to let drivers take their hands off the wheel.. you know, the true test of self driving. So how exactly are they close?

[fastball]

I didn't say "close", I said closer. Full self-driving (e.g. "Level 5") is driving everywhere a human can. I have doubts that Waymo will ever get to Level 5 without 3D mapping the entire world, which (to me) sounds like a somewhat intractable problem. There is a lot of world, and it is constantly changing.

The problem here is the "level" system everyone has been told is the standard, which heavily implies that if you're at "3" while someone else is at "2", then you're closer to "5". This isn't really true though because solutions at Level X don't necessarily scale/work at Level Y. I dislike using the level system for this reason.

I think Tesla is closer because they are certainly getting there[1], and I believe their model (relying entirely on CV) is the one that has the greatest likelihood of stretching to FSD (Level 5 autonomy). Mostly because there is only one system we're aware of that can achieve FSD (humans), and the sensory package there is entirely visual.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_zTZjCCoxo

[ra7]

> I have doubts that Waymo will ever get to Level 5 without 3D mapping the entire world

Waymo is not trying to get to L5 at all. They are a strictly L4 technology and their focus is clearly on servicing where the market is, metropolitan cities.

L5 is a pipe dream for anyone; it's a moving target no one can ever reach. It essentially means the car can drive anywhere, in all conditions and without the driver needing to take over at all. So it really means Tesla can't declare FSD as "done" until it works for everyone, everywhere and in every condition. How close do you think they are for that to happen? Does that also mean if it encounters a unique situation and gives up, their L5 claims fall flat? Given their current poor performance [1], they have a long way to go to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel, so I'm not holding my breath here (vision stack or not).

The real end game for self driving is L4 because that's what you can reasonably promise to your users. That it works in a defined, tested area and when required conditions are met. This is why literally every SDC company is L4-only, they never promise L5. Either Tesla is focusing on the wrong problem instead of providing value to its paying customers or they are blatantly misleading customers by promising "L5 by the end of the year" every year.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=antLneVlxcs

[fastball]

That's a reasonable stance, but we're talking about FSD here. Your opinion about whether that's possible at all isn't particularly germane to whether or not Tesla or Waymo is closer.

And yes, I would say my bar is a little lower than yours seems to be, as hinted at in my first comment. As long as the system can respond with a solution that is equivalent or better than what a human driver would do the vast majority of the time, I see that as FSD.

[JPKab]

I agree that Tesla dropping FSD would take a while. In addition to the huge sunk-cost and investor expectations, they have an entire strategy (via 3 year vehicle leases which are currently offering no-buyout for customers at termination) of monetizing leased vehicles as robo-taxis.

Not saying they will succeed here, but just saying that to give up on FSD would be corporate suicide at this point.