Comma.ai Drive and Tour with George Hotz and Lex Fridman

George Hotz gave me a Demo of the comma 2 on a ride back to the comma AI offices in San Diego. Then we took a quick tour of the office. I found both the comma2 system and the entire comma AI team and operation. Very impressive. Plus I got a 3D printer named after me as one robot to another. We're in this together, my brother. And now onto the ride and tour with George Hotz.

I'm here with driving with George Hotz and looking at the comma two, trying to find a stretch of road where we can enable it.

Start looping back to the office. I mean, I could enable it here, but this isn't really where it shines. But yeah, so we don't have, we don't have red lights and stop signs yet. I don't want to ship it until we have a real holistic one, until we have an end to end one.

So you'll be able to then like stop at a stop sign. So the longitudinal control, did you just enable it?

I just enabled it, yeah. So this is the. So we're gonna have to stop at this light. But.

How do you enable it?

Cruise control.

So that's the integrated knobs on the car.

We have a good. We'll go on the 163 a bit. And that's a good test of whether your level two system's any good. Super Cruise actually can't do it. Super Cruise can't do it because they're not good enough with roll on the road. Autopilot can do it and we can do.

How's San Diego in terms of quality of roads and lane markings and all that kind of stuff?

Pretty mediocre, like the rest of California.

What's your favorite reason for using comma, like when. When do you find the most joy?

Oh, oh, it's, it's long trips. It's, you know, driving from here to la. You'll do it without a disengagement almost. You can, you can. You know, it's two hours to LA from here. You could just go to la, get in your car and you just sit there and watch and it's, it's a, it's a great time. All right, so we can, we can engage here. So, you know, watch.

So it doesn't technically require perfect lane markings?

No, not at all. In fact, you can do lane changes on roads that don't have lane markings because it's all end to end. So I have to get over three lanes. Lanes. I'm just going to take control here to do it, especially since there's a cop there. So we can just get over three lanes and then this road's a decent demo. Yeah. So I think only us in autopilot can do this road. Pretty curvy. Yeah. And it's not just curvy, it's also banked. And if you don't. Yeah, if you don't do that. Well, if you don't have a model that can detect that. So the longitudinal policy is actually just being done by the car. Hyundai has quite a competent acc, probably the best one. So we haven't really felt the urge to move to our gas and brakes. There's a few cute things which ours will do better and more holistically than theirs, But really it's about the turning.

How hard is it to get it to be this smooth?

Hard. Five years of engineering all of this.

End to end, huh?

We are detecting the lane lines. They're used, but they're more used as a. See, like right there. That's the stock system being too harsh on the brakes. If you're a human driving, you would have been much more gradual on the brakes there. But we're really going to push to switch all the longitudinals to open pilot once we have end to end longitudinal, the same way we have end to end lateral.

What's harder? End to end longitudinal, End to end lateral.

We put a lot more work into end to end lateral because there's a lot more subtlety in that. The car companies have managed to build competent longitudinal. We have competent longitudinal using old school policies. But lateral, there's so much subtlety. For example, like when a lane splits out, should you follow that split? Should you stay in the center or should you stay to one side or. So much subtlety there.

And making it all smooth and not freak out and this thing.

You know the reason I feel very confident keeping my hands off the wheel. Our torque limit is so much lower than Tesla's.

So you can't do anything crazy.

No. We do injection tests where one person sits in that seat with a joystick and the other person keeps their hands off the wheel. And that person, you can't look at them, they're free to jam the joystick in any direction. And if you don't feel, you know, safe in that maneuver. But take back over here because we're getting off here. But yeah, that stretcher road is a. Is a competent demonstration of open pilot.

Yeah, that was impressive.

It's not the high end. Maybe when we get to the city streets, I'll Engage on the city streets.

Is city streets like a compelling use case or is that just kind of.

Without intuition, building without end to end longitudinal? It's pretty like it's not really useful as product. So it's more just. It's cool that it can do it. And like we don't we gated off. But most of open pilot is highways. Like most of the value real gain is highways, but also not just highways. Also like, like one lane each way kind of things like double yellow kind of roads. I was doing all like the mountains up in Colorado with this thing and just you get to look at the mountains more dries. So like I can engage it here. Now remember the longitudinal policy is Hyundai and it's not ideal for cities. But so again we're going to go through this intersection with no lines. See, Notice how there's no line there yet. Our placement is still almost human. Ideal.

Yeah, this is great.

So there, I mean there you see, we did a stretch of, you know, a minute of city and perfectly human. Nothing sketchy. So places like that or disengage on gas is really nice. Really easy to, you know, hand off. You always know when that handoff is happening with the noise. It didn't like keep the acc on or anything. God, if it kept the acc on and I make the turn and it's like trying to accelerate at a weird time, you know, just asking to have a bad time.

I like the, the sounds, the visual. It's like clear when it's on and when it's off. Love it. Well done.

Look at this.

Let's put on a biker. Damn, that's impressive. That's really impressive.

Let's do intersections without thinking about it.

Okay. That was awesome. It's communicating the uncertainty with its movement a little bit. I like it.

Humans actually wobble a little more than you think too. You notice it a lot more when.

That's an interesting point. Yeah, yeah, true.

I think Jess Levinson mentioned this in one of his interviews. He's like, so, you know, we have all these. We have the safety driver sit in the car and mark every tiny mistakes it made. And then we also had the safety driver sit in the car that was being human driven and mark all the little tiny mistakes it made.

So is the comma office in downtown.

Comma office is right here.

We're at kamaei offices with Mr. George Hartz. Can you give us a little tour?

It doesn't light up anymore. I don't know why. I think most of these dashboards are okay. We're almost at 30 million open pilot miles. Wow.

That'S a hell of a number.

So here, here's dailies, weeklies and actually yeah, dailies are like maybe not 2001.5.

So those are used daily and then used weekly. Yeah, that's really cool.

Weeklies are almost 2.5 and monthlies are a little over 3. This is how many devices are on our botnet in the last hour? Botnet last day, botnet last week.

Is this all over the United States?

This is. No, this is everywhere. So here's the maps. Here's the map of the world. So we're everywhere in the world. So let's see, in the last 30 days we had 2200 in the US and then Korea, Canada, Taiwan, Japan's up there. This is our percent engaged. So percent of miles engaged is about 50% percent time engaged is about 30. Our disengagements are split pretty evenly between cancel gas and brake. Most of our segments are now coming from comma 2s. Comma 2s. Comma 2 is the big breakout for this company. Yeah, and it's profitable. This is our live link to the Europe. Office comma is a multinational corporation.

George just erased a bunch of top secret things.

Censorship. The censors came in. Look, the mission's at the top of the board.

Solve self driving cars while delivering shippable intermediaries. Amen. What do we do badly? What can we do better? Right. Good questions. Open Pilot 1.0. When is that coming up?

When those things are done.

Pytorch. I like how that's the bullet point. That's like move everything to Pytorch.

Oh, sorry. It's not a data center. It's a compute cluster. Legal reasons. It's a compute cluster.

It's a compute cluster. Okay, let's sound sexier too. Data ingestion, multi chain. Cool. So this is like, this is the list vision board for OpenPilot 1.0.

It's not going to happen for a While, but the comma 2 is going to get open Pilot 1.0. It's like what I said with the hardware. So this is all going to come to the comma two.

Just with OTAs, OTA over there.

Yeah, I mean we're getting close on a lot of these. I'm going to start lowering the wheel. Touch timeout. Alex, you want to. This is Alex. Hi. Nice to meet you. She's our coo.

Coo. Hey, good to meet you.

She runs the back there stuff.

What's the technical description of the Back there.

Stuff you want to see? Yeah, I think it's more exciting than this stuff. Depends who you ask.

We hid all the secrets, right, Nick?

Do we have any secrets out?

I'll blur it out. I'll blur the top secret.

This is production stress test. This is our final test. The Kama 2s hang out here for about 24 hours. We test them their heat, their temperature, their light sensors. We do cosmetic checks, screen checks. So cool. Pretty exciting. You can see they all start over there as phones and they get retrofit. You see we have any classic 100 phones out right now? They're getting tested.

It's kind of exciting actually.

Lex, this is Mitchell. He's the latest addition to our machine learning team. That's Chris, also known as virtually Chris. He's a famous YouTuber.

Oh, wow. How did fame change you?

I introduced you as a famous YouTuber. Yes, I was the open pilot YouTuber.

Don't let it get to your head.

It's our head of hardware. Awesome.

What's. What's all the. What's that? Stage of the. Of the assembly.

Final case, the cases. So we have board testing, then the retrofit phones get board put on them, soldered to them. They get the heat sink and the fan, and then we put the cases on them.

Awesome.

Yeah, they're taking cases off screens off here. Testing screens over here.

Oven.

Yeah. 3D printer. You want to show that?

I will too.

Well, I'm afraid to take you in there. It's very hot and loud.

Well, it's all. It's also the home of the compute cluster.

It's our. It's not a data center.

It's not a data center. That's right. It's a compute cluster.

Prepare yourself.

It's the sound of productivity.

Yeah. Oh my God, it's really hot.

This is what you see on the outside of the commenters.

I like how they have names.

Meg.

Why? What's the purpose of the rings?

They used to be for athletic activity, but now we have too many printers. You can't. You can't anymore. We just got about 20 printers in the last few months. They've come from all over the world, literally Poland, Germany, Peru.

How long is it? How long does it take to 24 hours to print a single one?

Yes, we'll name. We'll name number 49 for you, Lex.

Thank you.

Yes, we'll call him Lex. I told him he could be number 49.

I could be. I could be.

49'S not working right now, but I.

Promise 49 will work drunk.

I appreciate that. That would mean a lot to me. Yeah, this is cool.

So unfortunately, because we got to keep the bugs and dust out, they're covered.

But.

One U the compute cluster. So these are our. These are our CPU machines. We have three racks that look like that. Two petabytes of spinning disk. Where are 3080s? Our 3080s are in only desktop computers for non business purposes. These are GPU machines.

What's in there?

A few one hundreds. Yep.

It's like a farm. Every day we kind of go out.

Yeah, it's like I said yesterday, like 21st century farm. We gotta hire a good Farmville player to come. Farmers every day. These are the ones that are ready to ship.

Wow.

I think this is. These are all of our growing harness. These are all the cars we support. Mca, Mac, Bosch, developer inac, Subaru, Toyota, all the Hyundais, all the way to J Nissan vw.

And all these are assembled by hand?

Yeah.

That's cool. That's amazing. That's legit. This is awesome.

Yeah, I don't know.

And that's. That's. That's the office.

Have you been for a ride in.

One of the cars?

Yeah, he took me for a ride.

It was awesome.

It was really surprising how well it worked.

Where'd you take him?

On the highway? We did like the 163 in the.

City a little bit too. It held up.

Definitely worked.

There's so many secrets, though.

No, there's so many secrets. It means like, keep on driving, you know? That's why we replaced it with a heart. We're all big Elon fans, you know, Elon's success. Elon's success is our success. If iOS succeeds, Android succeeds. Sam.