Ok my opinions. I understood like 99% of what they said.
1. I am a bit disappointed with the reports from the ground. It was a recruitment event and everyone is talking about it like it was a product reveal. I want to know who was in the audience, were they impressed, did people line up to hand in their resumes etc. Not about the product revealed. Anyway I was impressed. Imo to understand this event I think you need to read ”Genius Makers” to learn how companies work to attract AI talent and how talent are attracted to companies. The question about open source was an important one. I think Tesla will attract engineers who want to do cutting edge stuff, not academics who want to contribute to academia. Not like what Facebook, Microsoft et al had to do to catch up with Google. Karpathy is likely a very strong magnet for talent.
2. Tesla Vision stack is seriously cutting edge. Rate of progress is epic. I liked what they showed about how they handle updates of their internal map and how they select which features at which times to update when stationary. Have some questions about loop closures when going around a block I wish someone from the audience would have asked.
3. Their path planning search was awesome. Better than I had imagined. The problem with end2end is that currently we don’t have a good way to implement search in neural networks. So they use these feature layers in vector space and then do search in that. Also once we have a way of doing search by NN, not only with NN things will get strange, wonderful and scary. We already have a version of it here
greatly expanding what questions a neural network can answer and imo we are getting close to general AI with search by neural networks.
4. HW4 introduced with CT. Not sure if it’s so great to buy a HW3 car atm, maybe a lot of benefit to wait for CT and then it should not take too many months for the rest of the vehicles to switch.
5. Hacker news at Ycombinator is serious negative. But this comment was gold: ”He replaced his marketing department with a R&D department”
6. Robot reveal seriously scared me. Not the robot itself but the reminder that the singularity is coming closer. Tesla might not work with general AI, but their work into Dojo, transformers, search etc will push the technology needed for general AI forward.
7. It was nice to see and listen to the other two heads of tesla FSD team. Seemed some of them had multiple roles. I assume they are all very hardworking, intelligent and motivated. Tesla are trying to find more people like them, but the questions from the audience didn’t seem like it came from those kind of people. Maybe those were quiet and had interesting give and take dialogues at the booth rather than just asking questions they want answered as a lot of the audience seemed to do.
