bonnie
I play a nice person on twitter.
I'm determined not to pass judgment on situations where I am not aware of all the facts.
-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
Autopilot team changes
- Thread starter Zaxxon
- Start date
-
- Tags
- Autopilot Tesla Inc.
I'm determined not to pass judgment on situations where I am not aware of all the facts.
Tesla did not have to lie. "Many AP engineers" could equal 2. Or people's recollections might not be 100% accurate (shocking, I know). I agree with Bonnie that the effect of this action by Tesla to was that brain drain was kept to a minimum.
This isn't bean ball - both Tesla and Sterling potentially have billions of dollars at stake. Both parties are going to use whatever aggressive tactics they can get away with, whether than offends someone's sense of justice or not.
Tesla Autopilot: head of software Chris Lattner leaves, Tesla hires new head of AI and computer vision
Sounds like he was asked to leave.
Chris Lattner's background didn't seem like a great fit for heading up an autonomous driving group. Creator of a programming language is freaking awesome (Swift), but I would think you'd have to be a world class neural network person to head up autonomous driving. And it seems the new hire is just that.
FWIW Chris Lattner had a lot of other achievements apart from Swift, which in itself is already a huge deal. He envisioned/designed a fundamentally new and superior architecture for writing compilation tools, and built a team around it that ended up being able to replace GCC on several major OS'es, which is no small feat. I suppose you could make a AP1 -> AP2 stretch in why he's a good fit for the role, but at the same time, that's a stretch.
He's very qualified for a lot of roles, it's just this one might not have been a good fit.
Tesla Autopilot: head of software Chris Lattner leaves, Tesla hires new head of AI and computer vision
Seems AP is becoming more of a hardware/firmware thing
Seems AP is becoming more of a hardware/firmware thing
Last edited:
hockeythug
Active Member
The turnover is very disturbing. Mobileye really did a number on them and they are in obvious desperation mode. Continuing to take money for "Full Self Driving" is laughable and it should be refunded to anybody who has paid for it.
Last edited:
Or maybe we're just used to companies which watch the bottom line and are not that interested in innovation. Or not in innovation at a speed which interests Musk.
For example, he is not interested in vehicle production lines which move at a walking pace.
You could take that as a wider metaphor.
He was on autopilot and took the nearest exit.
mal_tsla
Member
"
- VP Autopilot Software
January 30 - June 20, 2017
When I joined Tesla, it was in the midst of a hardware transition from "Hardware 1" Autopilot (based primarily on MobileEye for vision processing) to "Hardware 2", which uses an in-house designed TeslaVision stack. The team was facing many tough challenges given the nature of the transition. My primary contributions over these fast five months were:
- We evolved Autopilot for HW2 from its first early release(which had few features and was limited to 45mph on highways) to effectively parity with HW1, and surpassing it in some ways (e.g. silky smooth control).
- This required building and shipping numerous features for HW2, including: support for local roads, Parallel Autopark, High Speed Autosteer, Summon, Lane Departure Warning, Automatic Lane Change, Low Speed AEB, Full Speed Autosteer, Pedal Misapplication Mitigation, Auto High Beams, Side Collision Avoidance, Full Speed AEB, Perpendicular Parking, and 'silky smooth' performance.
- This was done by shipping a total of 7 major feature releases, as well as numerous minor releases to support factory, service, and other narrow markets.
- One of Tesla's huge advantages in the autonomous driving space is that it has tens of thousands of cars already on the road. We built infrastructure to take advantage of this, allowing the collection of image and video data from this fleet, as well as building big data infrastructure in the cloud to process and use it.
- I defined and drove the feature roadmap, drove the technical architecture for future features, and managed the implementation for the next exciting features to come.
- I advocated for and drove a major rewrite of the deep net architecture in the vision stack, leading to significantly better precision, recall, and inference performance.
- I effectively stopped regretted attrition from the team, and ended up growing it by over 50%. I personally interviewed most of the accepted candidates.
- I made massive improvements to internal infrastructure and processes that I cannot go into detail about.
Overall I learned a lot, worked my butt off, met a lot of great people, and had a lot of fun. I'm still a firm believer in Tesla, its mission, and the exceptional Autopilot team: I wish them well.
"
Chris Lattner's Resume
Hmm. One thing that stands out is taking credit for silky smooth control and declaring AP1 parity: the update is still not rolling out wide as of his departure and I have not heard a single person describe any of the new improvements as better than AP1. I’m not sure who is the source of this delusion but now I’m really wondering if it’s Elon or Chris.
And advocating for rewrites is one of those things that doesn’t always work out in a large company..... Of course he may believe he improved things, but I’ve been through a few rewrites where the end result was less mature code with more bugs and a lot more upset engineers that their work was thrown out because of a difference of opinion in upper management.
EDIT: that and saying you’ve effectively stopped [regretted] attrition? Wow, it’s missing a few statements about solving world hunger and singlehandedly bringing peace to the Middle East.... some of these claims seem a bit grandiose to say the least.
Overall, of course, I'm being an Internet armchair commentator on a very qualified person's resume, yes, but this reads extremely pompously, and makes me wonder who is the true source of the delusionally dreamy descriptions of AP2. What I have in front of me I'd hardly describe the same way, nor call a success story or effectively parity. And now that he's shown the door, I don't understand why there's even a need to sugar coat any of this unless it really is what you believe.
Sounds like he and Elon ought to have gotten along better...
And advocating for rewrites is one of those things that doesn’t always work out in a large company..... Of course he may believe he improved things, but I’ve been through a few rewrites where the end result was less mature code with more bugs and a lot more upset engineers that their work was thrown out because of a difference of opinion in upper management.
EDIT: that and saying you’ve effectively stopped [regretted] attrition? Wow, it’s missing a few statements about solving world hunger and singlehandedly bringing peace to the Middle East.... some of these claims seem a bit grandiose to say the least.
Overall, of course, I'm being an Internet armchair commentator on a very qualified person's resume, yes, but this reads extremely pompously, and makes me wonder who is the true source of the delusionally dreamy descriptions of AP2. What I have in front of me I'd hardly describe the same way, nor call a success story or effectively parity. And now that he's shown the door, I don't understand why there's even a need to sugar coat any of this unless it really is what you believe.
Sounds like he and Elon ought to have gotten along better...
Last edited:
Yes, chillaban, you are being an armchair commentator. But ... I can't resist either
The resume is a bit naive in that he didn't have to spell out in such detail what he did. Isn't this the guy who built the Swift programming language among many other accomplishments at Apple? A more succinct resume would actually have more power. And this resume is potentially embarrassing for Elon and Tesla. "Elon and I agreed he and I didn't work well together" doesn't do either Musk or Lattner any favors. Any new employer is going to wonder what Lattner will say when he moves on from them in the future. Never ever malign your previous employer even if they so richly deserve it.
Regardless, you would think any company that needs to hire a software architect would be banging down Lattner's door right now. If he doesn't have five very high paying offers in a couple of weeks, I'll be very surprised.
The resume is a bit naive in that he didn't have to spell out in such detail what he did. Isn't this the guy who built the Swift programming language among many other accomplishments at Apple? A more succinct resume would actually have more power. And this resume is potentially embarrassing for Elon and Tesla. "Elon and I agreed he and I didn't work well together" doesn't do either Musk or Lattner any favors. Any new employer is going to wonder what Lattner will say when he moves on from them in the future. Never ever malign your previous employer even if they so richly deserve it.
Regardless, you would think any company that needs to hire a software architect would be banging down Lattner's door right now. If he doesn't have five very high paying offers in a couple of weeks, I'll be very surprised.
Yes, chillaban, you are being an armchair commentator. But ... I can't resist either
The resume is a bit naive in that he didn't have to spell out in such detail what he did. Isn't this the guy who built the Swift programming language among many other accomplishments at Apple? A more succinct resume would actually have more power. And this resume is potentially embarrassing for Elon and Tesla. "Elon and I agreed he and I didn't work well together" doesn't do either Musk or Lattner any favors. Any new employer is going to wonder what Lattner will say when he moves on from them in the future. Never ever malign your previous employer even if they so richly deserve it.
Regardless, you would think any company that needs to hire a software architect would be banging down Lattner's door right now. If he doesn't have five very high paying offers in a couple of weeks, I'll be very surprised.
Haha, hey, I believe it's a fundamental responsibility as a netizen to claim I can do anyone's job better than them
But yeah... I think overall the resume sounds rather pompous, and seems to take credit for an implausible amount of progress and undertakings over his 5 month tenure. And most of the bullet points would make AP2 owners who have sat through Jan 30 to now to sit back and scratch their heads trying to put 2 and 2 together....
I also agree that the "Elon and I agreed" comment did not need to be said on a resume, and that's probably why it was taken down. But as an AP2 owner I take issue with the person who used to lead the division, who at this point should no longer feel compelled to spin AP2 capabilities, describe AP2's capability and refinement in such exaggerated terms.
Regardless, what I think has no impact on the success of Chris and his amazing career and list of accomplishments so far. I'm sure he will find a better job that's a truer fit for him, and can take his time in finding the right match.
Just to be clear, this line is not/ is no longer in Lattner's resume.
Chris Lattner's Resume
Agreed. Fortunately that line isn't in his resume.
That's because it isn't.
Takeaway: People can change their minds, but the internet never allows you to forget.
Corollary: If you want to hold a grudge, hold it online.
Last edited:
Huh?
https://archive.is/XuKvb
It actually was in his resume. He deleted it not much later, but the Internet remembers things, unfortunately.
No worries dude, I saved the archive.is link forever to frameThanks chillaban.
I got there eventually
Have amended my post above
It’s the Internet, we can all quote each other saying silly things. Hopefully at the end of the day we all have a good time here talking about a car, ecosystem, and arguably lifestyle that we believe in!
Similar threads
