George Hotz: Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets | Lex Fridman Podcast #132

The following is a conversation with George Hotz, AKA Geo Hot, his second time on the podcast. He's the founder of Comma AI, an autonomous and semi autonomous vehicle technology company that seeks to be to Tesla Autopilot what Android is to the iOS. They sell the Cama 2 device for $1,000 that when installed in many of their supported cars, can keep the vehicle centered in the lane. And even when there are no lane markings, it includes driver sensing that ensures that the driver's eyes are on the road. As you may know, I'm a big fan of driver sensing. I do believe Tesla Autopilot and others should definitely include it in their sensor suite. Also, I'm a fan of Android and a big fan of George for many reasons, including his nonlinear out of the box brilliance and the fact that he he's a superstar programmer of a very different style than myself. Styles make fights and styles make listen to and enjoy. And finally, express vpn, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the Internet. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that my work at MIT on autonomous and semi autonomous vehicles led me to study the human side of autonomy and enough to understand that it's a beautifully complicated and interesting problem space, much richer than what can be studied in the lab. In that sense, the data that Comma, AI, Tesla Autopilot and perhaps others like Cadillac Supercruise are collecting gives us a chance to understand how we can design safe semi autonomous vehicles for real human beings in real world conditions. I think this requires bold innovation and a serious exploration of the first principles of the driving task itself. If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter lexfriedman. And now here's my conversation with George Hotz. So last time we started talking about the simulation, this time let me ask you, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

I've always maintained my answer to the Fermi paradox. I think there has been intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

So intelligent civilizations existed, but they've blown themselves up. So your general intuition is that intelligent civilizations quickly, like there's that parameter in the Drake equation, your sense is they don't last very long.

Yeah.

How are we doing on that? Like, have we lasted pretty, pretty good? Oh no, we do.

Oh yeah. I mean, not quite yet. The IQ required to destroy the World falls by one point every year.

Okay, so technology democratizes the destruction of the world.

When can a meme destroy the world?

It kind of is already right somewhat.

I don't think we've seen anywhere near the worst of it yet. World's going to get weird.

Well, maybe a meme can save the world. You thought about that? The meme lord, Elon Musk fighting on the side of good versus the Memelord of the darkness, which is not saying anything bad about Donald Trump, but he is the lord of the meme. On the dark side, he's the Darth Vader of memes.

I think in every fairy tale, they always end it with and they lived happily ever after. And I'm like, please, tell me more about this happily ever after. I've heard 50% of marriages end in divorce. Why doesn't your marriage end up there? You can't just say happily ever after. So the thing about destruction is it's over after the destruction. We have to do everything right in order to avoid it. And one thing wrong. I mean, actually, this is what I really like about cryptography. Cryptography, it seems like we live in a world where the defense wins versus, like, nuclear weapons. The opposite is true. It is much easier to build a warhead that splits into 100 little warheads than to build something that can, you know, take out 100 little warheads. The offense has the advantage there. So maybe our future is in crypto.

But so cryptography, right? The Goliath is the defense, and then all the different hackers are the. Are the Davids. And that equation is flipped for nuclear war because there's so many. Like, one nuclear weapon destroys everything, essentially.

Yeah. And it is much easier to attack with a nuclear weapon than it is to, like. The technology required to intercept and destroy a rocket is much more complicated than the technology required to just, you know, orbital trajectory, send a rocket to somebody.

So, okay, your intuition that there were intelligent civilizations out there, but it's very possible that they're no longer there. That's kind of a sad picture.

They enter some steady state. They all wirehead themselves.

What's wirehead?

Stimulate. Stimulate their pleasure centers and just, you know, live forever in this kind of stasis. They become. Well, I mean, I think the reason I believe this is because where are they? If there's some reason they stopped expanding, because otherwise they would have taken over the universe. The universe isn't that big. Or at least, you know, let's just talk about the galaxy, right? 70,000 light years across. I took that number from Star Trek Voyager. I don't know how true it is, but. Yeah, that's not big, right? 70,000 light years is nothing for some.

Possible technology that you can imagine that can leverage, like wormholes or something like that.

You don't even need wormholes. Just a von Neumann probe is enough. A von Neumann probe and a million years of sublight travel and you'd have taken over the whole universe. That clearly didn't happen. So something stopped it.

So you mean if you write for. For like a few million years, if you sent out probes that travel close. What's sublight? You meaning close to the speed of light? Let's say 0.1 C. And it just spreads. Interesting. Actually, that's an interesting calculation. Huh? But what makes you think that we'd be able to communicate with them? Like. Yeah, what's. Why do you think we would able to. To be able to comprehend intelligent lives that are out there, like, even if they were among us kind of thing, like. Or even just flying around?

Well, I mean, that's possible. It's possible that there is some sort of Prime Directive that'd be a really cool universe to live in, and there's some reason they're not making themselves visible to us. But it makes sense that they would use the same. Well, at least the same entropy.

Well, you're implying the same laws of physics. I don't know what you mean by entropy in this case.

Oh, yeah. I mean, if entropy is the scarce resource in the universe.

So what do you think about, like, Stephen Wolfram and everything is a computation, and then what if they are traveling through this world of computation? So if you think of the universe as just information processing, then what you're referring to with entropy, and then these pockets of interesting, complex computation swimming around, how do we know they're not already here? How do we know that this, like, all the different amazing things that are full of mystery on Earth are just like little footprints of intelligence from light years away?

Maybe. I mean, I tend to think that as civilizations expand, they use more and more energy. And you can never overcome the problem of waste heat. So where is there waste heat?

So we'd be able to, with our crude methods, be able to see, like, there's a whole lot of energy here. But it could be something we're not. I mean, we don't understand dark energy, right? Dark matter. It could be just stuff we don't understand at all. Or they can have a fundamentally different physics, you know, like, that we just don't even comprehend.

Well, I think. Okay, I mean, it depends how far out you want to go. I don't think physics is very different on the other side of the galaxy. I would suspect that they have, I mean, if they're in our universe, they have the same physics.

Well, yeah, that's the assumption we have. But there could be like super trippy things like, like our cognition only gets to a slice and all the possible instruments that we can design only get to a particular slice of the universe and there's something much like weirder.

Maybe we can try a thought experiment. Would people from the past be able to detect the remnants of our. Would be able to detect our modern civilization? I think the answer is obviously yes.

You mean past from 100 years ago?

Well, let's even go back further. Let's go to a million years ago. The humans who were lying around in the desert probably didn't even have, maybe they just barely had fire. They would understand if a 747 flew overhead.

In this vicinity, but not if a 747 flew on Mars because they wouldn't be able to see far because we're not actually communicating that well with the rest of the universe. We're doing okay just sending out random like 50s tracks of music.

True. And yeah, I mean they'd have to, you know, we've only been broadcasting radio waves for 150 years and. Well, there's your light cone. So.

Yeah. Okay. What do you make about all the. I recently came across this having talked to David Fraver. I don't know if you caught what the, the videos that Pentagon released and the New York Times reporting of the UFO sightings. So I kind of looked into it, quote unquote. And there's actually been like hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings. Right. And a lot of it you can explain away in different kinds of ways. So one is it could be interesting physical phenomena. Two, it could be people wanting to believe and therefore they conjure up a lot of different things that just, you know, when you see different kinds of lights, some basic physics phenomena, and then you just conjure up ideas of possible out there mysterious worlds. But you know, it's also possible, like you have a case of David Fravor, who is a Navy pilot, who's, you know, as legit as it gets in terms of humans who are able to perceive things in the environment and make conclusions whether those things are a threat or not. And he and several other pilots saw a thing. I don't know if you followed this, but they saw a thing that They've since then called Tick Tock. That moved in all kinds of weird ways. They don't know what it is. It could be technology developed by, by the United States and they're just not aware of it. And the surface level from the Navy. Right. It could be different kind of lighting technology or drone technology, all that kind of stuff. It could be the Russians and the Chinese, all that kind of stuff. And of course their mind, our mind, can also venture into the possibility that it's from another world. Have you looked into this at all? What do you think about it?

I think all the news is a psyop. I think that the most plausible thing is real. Yeah, I listened to the. I think it was Bob Lazar on Joe Rogan and I believe everything this guy is saying. And then I think that it's probably just some like MK Ultra kind of thing, you know?

What do you mean?

Like they, they, you know, they made some weird thing and they called it an alien spaceship. You know, maybe it was just to like stimulate young physicists minds, tell them it's alien technology and we'll see what they come up with. Right.

Do you find any conspiracy theories compelling? Like, have you pulled at the string of the. Of the rich, complex world of conspiracy theories that's out there?

I think that I've heard a conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories were invented by the CIA in the 60s to discredit true things?

Yeah.

So, you know, you can go to ridiculous conspiracy theories like Flat Earth and Pizzagate and you know, these things are almost to hide, like conspiracy theories that like, you know, remember when the Chinese like locked up the doctors who discovered coronavirus? Like, I tell people this and I'm like, no, no, that's not a conspiracy theory that actually happened. Do you remember the time that the money used to be backed by gold and now it's backed by nothing? This is not a conspiracy theory. This actually happened.

Well, that's one of my worries today with the idea of fake news is that when nothing is real, then like you dilute the possibility of anything being true by conjuring up all kinds of conspiracy theories. And then you don't know what to believe. And then like the idea of truth, of objectivity is lost completely. Everybody has their own truth.

So you used to control information by censoring it. Then the Internet happened and governments were like, oh shit, we can't censor things anymore. I know what we'll do. You know, it's the old story of the story of like tying a flag where the leprechaun tells you his gold is buried, and you tie one flag and you make the leprechaun swear to not remove the flag and you come back to the field later with a shovel and there's flags everywhere.

That's one way to maintain privacy. Right. Is like, in order to protect the contents of this conversation, for example, we could just generate like millions of deep fake conversations where you and I talk and say random things.

Yeah.

So this is just one of them and nobody knows which one was the real one. This, this could be fake right now.

Classic steganography technique.

Okay. Another absurd question about intelligent life because, you know, you're. You're an incredible programmer. Outside of everything else we'll talk about, just as a programmer, do you think intelligent beings out there, the civilizations that were out there, had computers and programming? Did they? Do we naturally have to develop something where we engineer machines and are able to encode both knowledge into those machines and instructions that process that knowledge, process that information to make decisions and actions and so on. And with those programming languages, if you think they exist, be at all similar to anything we've developed.

So I don't see that much of a difference between quote, unquote natural languages and programming languages. Yeah, I think there's so many similarities. So when asked the question, what do alien languages look like? I imagine they're not all that dissimilar from ours. And I think translating in and out of them wouldn't be that crazy.

Well, it's difficult to compile like DNA to Python and then to see there is a little bit of a gap in, in the kind of languages we use for, for touring machines and the kind of languages nature seems to use a little bit. Maybe that's just. We just haven't cr. We haven't understood the kind of language that nature uses well yet.

DNA is a CAD model. It's not quite a programming language. It has no sort of serial execution. It's not quite a. Yeah, it's a CAD model. So I think in that sense we actually completely understand it. The problem is simulating on these CAD models, I played with it a bit this year, is super computationally intensive. If you want to go down to the molecular level, where you need to go, to see a lot of these phenomenon like protein folding. So, yeah, it's not that we don't understand it. It just requires a whole lot of.

Compute to kind of compile it for human minds. It's inefficient both for the data representation and for the programming.

Yeah, it runs well on raw Nature. It runs well on raw nature. And when we try to build emulators or simulators for that. Well, in manslaughter. And I've tried.

Runs in. Yeah, you've commented elsewhere. I don't remember where that. One of the problems is simulating nature is tough. And if you want to sort of deploy a prototype. I forgot how you. You put it, but it made me laugh. But animals or humans would need to be involved in order to. In order to try to run some prototype code on, like, if we're talking about COVID and viruses and so on. If you were trying to engineer some kind of defense mechanisms, like a vaccine against Covid or all that kind of stuff, that doing any kind of experimentation like you can, with like autonomous vehicles would be very technically cost. Technically and ethically costly.

Oh, I'm not sure about that. I think you can do tons of crazy biology and in test tubes. I think my bigger complaint is more all the tools are so bad.

Like, literally. You mean like, like libraries.

And I know I'm not pipetting like you're handing me a. I gotta. No, no, no.

There has to be some like automating stuff and like the. Yeah, but human biology is messy. Like it seems like.

Look at those Theranos videos. They were a joke. It's like. It's like a little gantry. It's like whole XY gantry high school science project with the pipette.

I'm like, really gotta be something better.

You can't build like nice microfluidics. And I can program the, you know, computation to bio interface. I mean, this is gonna happen. But like right now, if you are asking me to pipette 50 ML of solution amount. This is so crude.

Yeah, okay, let's get all the crazy out of the way. So a bunch of people asked me, since we talked about the simulation last time we talked about hacking the simulation, do you have any updates, any insights about how we might be able to go about hacking simulation if we indeed do live in a simulation?

I think a lot of people misinterpreted the point of that south by talk. The point of the south by talk was not literally to hack the simulation. I think that this is. This is an idea is literally just. I think theoretical physics. I think that's the whole, you know, the whole goal. Right? You want your grand unified theory, but then, okay, build a grand unified theory. Search for exploits, right? I think we're nowhere near actually there yet. My hope with that was just more to like. Are you people kidding me with the things you spend time thinking about. Do you understand, like, kind of how small you are? You are bytes and God's computer, really? And the things that people get worked up about.

And, you know, so basically it was more a message of we should humble ourselves, that we get to like, what. What are we, humans in this bytecode?

Yeah. And not just. Just humble ourselves, but like. Like, I'm not trying to, like, make people guilty or anything like that. I'm trying to say, like, literally look at what you are spending time on. Right.

What are you referring to? You're referring to the Kardashians. What are we talking about?

No, the Kardashians. See, everyone knows that's kind of fun. I'm referring more to, like, the economy, you know, this idea that we gotta up our stock price or what is the goal function of humanity.

You don't like the game of capitalism? Like, you don't like the games we've constructed for ourselves as humans?

I'm a big fan of capitalism. I don't think that's really the game we're playing right now. I think we're playing a different game where the rules are rigged.

Okay, which games are interesting to you that we humans have constructed and which aren't. Which are productive and which are not.

Actually, maybe that's the real point of the. Of the talk. It's like, stop playing these fake human games. There's a real game here. We can play the real game. The real game is, you know, nature wrote the rules. This is a real game. There still is a game to play.

But if you look at. Sorry to interrupt. I don't know if you've seen the Instagram account. Nature is metal. The game that nature seems to be playing is a lot more cruel than we humans want to put up with. Or at least we see it as cruel. It's like the bigger thing eats the smaller thing and does it to impress another big thing so it can mate with that thing. And that's it. That seems to be the entirety of it. Well, there's no art. There's no music. There's no comma AI. There's no comma 1, no comma 2, no. George Hotz with his brilliant talks at south by Southwest.

See, I disagree, though. I disagree that this is what nature is. I think nature just provided basically a open world mmorpg. And, you know, here it's open world. I mean, if that's the game you want to play, you can play that game.

What that. Isn't that. Isn't that beautiful? I Don't know if you play Diablo, they used to have, I think cow level where it's. So everybody will go just. They figured out this like, the best way to gain like experience points is to just slaughter cows over and over and over. And so they figured out this little sub game within the bigger game that this is the most efficient way to get experience points. And everybody somehow agreed that getting experience points in RPG context, where you always want to be getting more stuff, more skills, more levels, keep advancing, that seems to be good. So might as well spend sacrifice actual enjoyment of playing a game, exploring a world and spending like hundreds of hours of your time at cow level. I mean, the number of hours I spent in KA level now I'm not like the most impressive person because people have spent probably thousands of hours there, but it's ridiculous. So that's a little absurd game that brought me joy in some weird dopamine drug kind of way.

Yeah.

So you don't like those games? You don't think that's us humans failing the nature?

I think so.

And that was the point of the talk.

Yeah.

So how do we hack it then?

Well, I want to live forever and wait, I want to live forever and.

This is the goal.

Well, that's a game against nature.

Yeah. Immortality is the good objective function to you.

I mean, start there and then you can do whatever else you want because you got a long time.

What if immortality makes the game just totally not fun? I mean, like, why do you assume immortality is somehow. It's not a good objective function.

It's not immortality that I want, a true immortality where I could not die. I would prefer what we have right now, but I want to choose my own death. Of course I don't want nature to decide when I die. I'm going to win. I'm going to be you.

And then at some point, if you choose, commit suicide. Like how long you think you'd live?

Until I get bored.

See, I don't think people like in, like brilliant people like you that really ponder living a long time are really considering how meaningless life becomes.

Well, I want to know everything and then I'm ready to die as long as.

Why do you want. Isn't it possible that you want to know everything because it's finite? Like the reason you want to know, quote unquote everything is because you don't have enough time to know everything. And once you have unlimited time, then you realize, like, why do anything? Like, why learn anything?

I want to know everything and then I'm ready to die.

So you have. Yeah, well, it's not.

It's not a. Like it's a terminal value. It's not. It's not in service of anything else.

I'm conscious of the possibility. This is not a certainty, but the possibility is of that engine of curiosity that you're speaking to is actually a symptom of the finiteness of life. Like without that finiteness, your curiosity would vanish like a morning fog.

All right, cool.

Talked about love like that.

Then let me solve immortality. Let me change the thing in my brain that reminds me of the fact that I'm immortal tells me that life is finite. Shit, maybe I'll have it tell me that life ends next week. Right? I'm okay with some self manipulation like that. I'm okay with deceiving.

Oh, Rika. Changing the code.

If that's the problem. Right. If the problem is that I will no longer have that curiosity. I'd like to have backup copies of myself. Well, which I check in with occasionally to make sure they're okay with the trajectory and they can kind of override it. Maybe a nice, like I think like those wave nets, those like logarithmic go back to the copies.

Yeah, but sometimes it's not reversible. Like.

Sure.

I've done this with video games when once you figure out the cheat code or like you look up how to cheat old school, like single player, it ruins the game for you.

Absolutely. I know that feeling. But again, that just means our brain manipulation technology is not good enough yet. Remove that cheat code from your brain.

What if we. So it's also possible that if we figure out immortality that all of us will kill ourselves before we advance far enough to be able to revert the change.

Well, I'm not killing myself till I know everything.

That's what you say now. Because your life is finite.

You know, I think yes. Self modifying systems comes up with all these hairy complexities and can I promise that I'll do it perfectly? No, but I think I can put good safety structures in place.

So that talk in your thinking here is not literally referring to a simulation in that our. Our universe is a kind of computer program running in a computer. That's more of a thought experiment. Do you also think of the potential of the sort of Bostrom, Elon, Musk and others that talk about an actual program that simulates our universe?

Oh, I don't doubt that we're in a simulation. I just think that it's not quite that important. I mean, I'm interested only in simulation theory as Far as, like, it gives me power over nature. If it's totally unfalsifiable, then who cares?

I mean, what do you think that experiment would look like? Like somebody on Twitter asked, ask George what signs we would look for to know whether or not we're in the simulation. Which is exactly. What you're asking is like the step that precedes the step of knowing how to get more power from this knowledge is to get an indication that there's some power to be gained. So get an indication that you can discover and exploit cracks in the simulation or doesn't have to be in the physics of the universe.

Yeah, show me. I mean, like, a memory leak would be cool. Like some scrying technology, you know?

What kind of technology?

Scrying?

What's that?

Oh, that's a weird. Scrying is the paranormal ability to, like, remote viewing. Like being able to see somewhere where you're not. So, you know, I don't think you can do it by chanting in a room. But if we could find. There's a memory leak. Basically.

It's a memory leak.

Yeah.

You're able to access parts you're not supposed to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And thereby discover a shortcut.

Yeah, maybe I. Memory leak means the other thing as well. But I mean, like. Yeah, like an ability to read arbitrary memory. Right. And that one's not that horrifying. Right. The right ones start to be horrifying.

Read. Right. So the reading is not the problem.

Yeah. It's like heartbleed for the universe.

Oh, boy. The writing is a big, big problem. It's a big problem. It's the moment you can write anything, even if it's just random noise, that's terrifying.

I mean, even without. Even without that, like, even some of the, you know, the nanotech stuff that's coming, I think is.

I don't know if you're paying attention, but actually, Eric Weinstein came out with the theory of everything. I mean, that came out. He's been working on a theory of everything in the physics world called geometric unity. And then for me, from computer science person like you, Stephen Wolfram's theory of everything of hypergraphs is super interesting and beautiful, but not from a physics perspective, but from a computational perspective. I don't know. Have you paid attention to any of that?

So again, what would make me pay attention and why I hate string theory is okay, make a testimal prediction. Right. I'm only interested in. I'm not interested in theories for their intrinsic beauty. I'm interested in theories that Give me power over the universe. So if these theories do, I'm very interested.

Can't you say how beautiful that is? Because a lot of physicists say I'm interested in experimental validation, and they skip out the part where they say, to give me more power in the universe. I just love the clarity of that.

I want 100 gigahertz processors. I want transistors that are smaller than atoms. I want, like, power.

That's. That's true. And that's where people, from aliens to this kind of technology, where people are worried that governments, like, who owns that power? Is it George Hotz? Is it thousands of distributed hackers across the world? Is it governments? You know, is it Mark Zuckerberg? There's a lot of people that I don't know if anyone trusts any one individual with power. So they're always worried.

It's the beauty of blockchains.

That's the beauty of blockchains, which we'll talk about on Twitter. Somebody pointed me to a story, a bunch of people pointed me to a story a few months ago where you went into a restaurant in New York, and you can correct me if any of this is wrong, and ran into a bunch of folks from a company in crypto company who are trying to scale up Ethereum. And they had a technical deadline related to solidity to OVM compiler. So these are all Ethereum technologies. So you stepped in, they recognized you, pulled you aside, explained their problem, and you stepped in and helped them solve the problem, thereby creating legend status story. Can you tell me the story a little more detail? It seems kind of incredible. Did this happen?

Yeah, yeah, it's a true story. It's a true story. I mean, they wrote a very flattering account of it. So optimism is the spin. The company's called Optimism spin off of plasma. They're trying to build L2 solutions on Ethereum. So right now, every Ethereum node has to run every transaction on the Ethereum network. And this kind of doesn't scale, right? Because if you have N computers, well, if that becomes 2N computers, you actually still get the same amount of compute. This is like O of 1 scaling, because they all have to run it. Okay, fine, you get more blockchain security, but the blockchain's already so secure. Can we trade some of that off for speed? So that's kind of what these L2 solutions are. They built this thing, which kind of a sandbox for Ethereum contracts, so they can run it in this L2 world and it can't do certain Things in L world, in L1.

Can I ask you for some definitions? What's L2?

Oh, L2 is layer two. So L1 is like the base Ethereum chain. And then layer two is like a computational layer that runs elsewhere but still is kind of secured by layer one.

And I'm sure a lot of people know, but Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, probably one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, second to Bitcoin and a lot of interesting technological innovations there. Maybe you can also slip in whenever you talk about this, any things that are exciting to you in the Ethereum space. And why Ethereum?

Well, I mean, Bitcoin is not Turing complete. Ethereum is not technically Turing complete with the gas limit, but close enough with the gas limit.

What's the gas limit?

Resources. Yeah. I mean, no, computers actually turn complete.

Right, Right.

Finite ram. You know what if I can actually solve the whole thing, what's the word?

Gas limit. You just have so many brilliant words. I'm not even going to ask what that's. What?

That's. No, no, that's not my word. That's Ethereum's word, gas limit. Ethereum, you have to spend gas per instruction. So like different opcodes use different amounts of gas and you buy gas with ether to prevent people from basically ddosing the network.

So Bitcoin is proof of work. And then what's Ethereum?

It's also proof of work. They're working on some proof of stake Ethereum 2.0 stuff, but right now it's proof of work. It uses a different hash function from Bitcoin that's more ASIC resistance because you need RAM.

So we're all talking about Ethereum 1.0. So what were they trying to do to scale this whole process?

So they were like, well, if we could run contracts elsewhere and then only save the results of that computation. But we don't actually have to do the compute on the chain, we can do the compute off chain and just post what the results are. Now, the problem with that is, well, somebody could lie about what the results are. So you need a resolution mechanism. And the resolution mechanism can be really expensive because you just have to make sure that the person who is saying, look, I swear that this is the real computation, I'm staking $10,000 on that fact. And if you prove it wrong, yeah, it might cost you $3,000 in gas fees to prove wrong, but you'll get the $10,000 bounty. So you can secure using those kind of systems. So it's effectively a sandbox which runs contracts. And like, just like any kind of normal sandbox, you have to like replace syscalls with, you know, calls into the hypervisor.

Sandbox, syscalls, hypervisor. What do these things mean? As long as it's interesting to talk about.

Yeah, I mean you can take like the, the Chrome sandbox is maybe the one to think about. Right. So the Chrome process that's doing a rendering can't for example, read a file from the file system. Yeah, it has if it tries to make an open syscall in Linux, the open syscall. You can't make it open syscall. No, no, no. You have to request from the kind of hypervisor process or like, I don't know what's called in Chrome, but the canoe. Hey, could you open this file for me? And then it does all these checks and then it passes the file handle back in if it's approved.

Got it.

So that's. Yeah.

So what's the, in the context of Ethereum, what are the boundaries of the sandbox that we're talking about?

Well, like one of the calls that you actually reading and writing any state to the Ethereum contract to the Ethereum blockchain writing state is one of those calls that you're going to have to sandbox in layer two, because if you let layer two just arbitrarily write to the Ethereum blockchain.

So layer two is. Accept is really sitting on top of layer one. So you're going to have a lot of different kinds of ideas that you can play with. Yeah, and they're all, they're not fundamentally changing the source code level of Ethereum.

Well, you have to replace a bunch of calls with calls into the hypervisor. So instead of doing the syscall directly, you. You replace it with a call to the hypervisor. So originally they were doing this by first running the Solidity is the language that most Ethereum contracts are written in. It compiles to a bytecode and then they wrote this thing they called the transpiler. And the Transpiler took the bytecode and it transpiled it into OVM safe bytecode, basically bytecode that didn't make any of those restricted syscalls and added the calls to the hypervisor. This Transpiler was a 3,000 line mess. And it's hard to do. It's hard to do if you're trying to do it like that because you have to kind of like deconstruct the bytecode change things about it and then reconstruct it. And, I mean, as soon as I hear this, I'm like, well, why don't you just change the compiler? Right? Why not? The first place you build the bytecode, just do it in the compiler. So, yeah, you know, I asked them how much they wanted it, of course, measured in dollars, and I'm like, well, okay. And.

Yeah. And you wrote the compiler?

Yeah, I modified. I wrote a 300 line diff to the compiler, its own source. You can look at it.

Yeah, it's. Yeah, I looked at the code last night.

It's cute.

Yeah, exactly is a good word for it. And it's C. C, yeah. So when asked how you were able to do it, you said you just got to think and then do it. Right. So can you break that apart a little bit? What's your process of one, thinking and two, doing it Right?

The people I was working for were amused that I said that. It doesn't really mean anything. Okay.

I mean, is there some deep, profound insights to draw from, like how you problem solve from that?

This is always what I say. I'm like, do you want to be a good programmer? Do it for 20 years?

Yeah. There's no shortcuts.

No.

What are your thoughts on crypto in general? So what parts, technically or philosophically, do you find especially beautiful? Maybe.

Oh, I'm extremely bullish on crypto long term. Not any specific crypto project, but this idea of. Well, two ideas. One, the Nakamoto consensus algorithm is, I think, one of the greatest innovations of the 21st century. This idea that people can reach consensus, you can reach a group consensus using a relatively straightforward algorithm is wild. And like Satoshi Nakamoto, people always ask me who I look up to. It's like, whoever that is.

Who do you think it is? Elon Musk? Is it you?

It is definitely not me, and I do not think it's Elon Musk. But, yeah. This idea of groups reaching consensus in a decentralized yet formulaic way is one extremely powerful idea from crypto. Maybe the second idea is this idea of smart contracts. When you write a contract between two parties, any contract, this contract, if there are disputes, it's interpreted by lawyers. Lawyers are just really shitty, overpaid interpreters. Imagine you had. Let's talk about them in terms of a. In terms of like. Let's compare a lawyer to Python. Right? So lawyer. Well, okay. That's brilliant.

I never thought of it that way. It's hilarious.

So, Python, I'm paying even 10 cents an hour. I'll use the nice Azure machine. I can run Python for 10 cents an hour. Lawyers cost $1,000 an hour. So Python is 10,000x better on that axis. Lawyers don't always return the same answer. Python almost always does.

Cost.

Yeah, I mean, just cost, reliability. Everything about Python is so much better than lawyers. So if you can make smart contracts, this whole concept of code is law. I love, and I would love to live in a world where everybody accepted that fact.

So maybe you can talk about what smart contracts are.

So let's say, let's say we have even something as simple as safety deposit box. Safety deposit box that holds $1 million. I have a contract with the bank that says two out of these three parties must be present to open the safety deposit box and get the money out. So that's a contract with the bank. And it's only as good as the bank and the lawyers. Right? Let's say somebody dies and now we're going to go through a big legal dispute about whether. Oh, well, was it in the will? Was it not in the will? It's just so messy. And the cost to determine truth is so expensive versus a smart contract which just uses cryptography to check if two out of three keys are present. Well, I can look at that and I can have certainty in the answer that it's going to return. And that's what all businesses want, is certainty. You know, they say businesses don't care. Viacom, YouTube, YouTube's like, look, we don't care which way this lawsuit goes. Just please tell us so we can have certainty.

I wonder how many agreements in this. Because we're talking about financial transactions only in this case, correct. The smart, smart contracts.

Oh, you can go to, you can go to anything. You can put a prenup in the Ethereum. Blockchain.

Married, smart contract.

Sorry, divorce lawyer. You're going to be replaced by Python.

Okay, that's another beautiful idea. Do you think there's something that's appealing to you about any one specific implementation? So if you look 10, 20, 50 years down the line, do you see any, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, any of the other hundreds of cryptocurrencies winning out? What's your intuition about the space? Are you just sitting back and watching the chaos? And who cares what emerges?

Oh, I don't speculate. I don't really care. I don't really care which one of these projects wins. I'm kind of in the Bitcoin as a meme coin camp. I mean, why does Bitcoin have value. It's technically kind of.

What?

Yeah, not great. Like the block size debate. When I found out what the block size debate was, I'm like, are you guys kidding?

What's the block size debate?

You know what, it's really. It's too stupid to even talk about. People can look it up but I'm like, wow, Ethereum seems. The governance of Ethereum seems much better. I've come around a bit on proof of stake ideas. Very smart people thinking about some things.

Yeah. You know, governance is interesting. It does feel like Vitalik like it does feel like in open. Even in these distributed systems. Leaders are helpful because they kind of help you drive the mission and the vision and they put a face to a project. It's a weird thing about us humans.

Geniuses are helpful. Like Metallica.

Yeah. Brilliant leaders are not necessarily. Yeah. So you think the reason he's the face of Ethereum is because he's a genius. That's interesting. I mean that was. It's interesting to think about that we need to create systems in which the quote unquote leaders that emerge are the geniuses in the system. I mean that's arguably why the current state of democracy is broken is the people who are emerging as the leaders are not the most competent are not the superstars of the system. And it seems like, at least for now in the crypto world, oftentimes the leaders are the superstars.

Imagine at the debate they asked, what's the sixth Amendment? What are the four fundamental forces in the universe? What's the integral of two to the X? Yeah, I'd love to see those questions asked. And that's what I want as our leader.

It's a little bit Bayes rule. Yeah. I mean even oh wow, you're hurting my brain. My standard was even lower. But I would have loved to see just this basic brilliance. Like I've talked to historians. There's just these, they're not even like they don't have a PhD or even education history. They just like a Dan Carlin type character who just like holy. How did all this information get into your head? They're able to just connect Genghis Khan to the entirety of the history of the 20th century. They, they know everything about every single battle that happened and they know the, the, the like the Game of Thrones of the, of the different power plays and all that happened there. And they know like the individuals and all the documents involved and they integrate that into their regular life. It's not like they're ultra history nerds they're just, they know this information. That's what competence looks like. Yeah, because I've seen that with programmers too. That's what great programmers do. But yeah, it would be. It's really unfortunate that those kinds of people aren't emerging as our leaders. But for now, at least in the crypto world, that seems to be the case. I don't know if that always. You could imagine that in 100 years it's not the case. Right.

The crypto world has one very powerful idea going for it and that's the idea of forks. Right. I mean, you know, imagine we'll use a less controversial example. This was actually in my Joke app in 2012. I was like, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, let's let them both be president. Right. Like imagine we could fork America and just let them both be president and then the Americas could compete and you know, people could invest in one, pull their liquidity out of one, put it in the other. You have this in the crypto world, Ethereum forks into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic and you can pull your liquidity out of one and put it in another and people vote with their dollars. Which forks companies should be able to fork. I'd love to fork Nvidia, you know.

Yeah. Like different business strategies and then try them out and see, see what works. Like even take, Yeah, take comm AI that closes its source and then take one that's open source and see what works. Take one that's purchased by GM and one that remains Android Renegade and all these different versions and see the beauty.

Of comma AI is someone can actually do that. Yeah, please take comma AI and fork it.

That's right. That's the beauty of open source. So you're, I mean we'll talk about autonomous vehicle space, but it does seem that you're really knowledgeable about a lot of different topics. So the natural question a bunch of people ask this, which is how do you keep learning new things? Do you have like practical advice if you were to introspect, like taking notes, allocate time, or do you just mess around and just allow your curiosity to drive?

I'll write these people a self help book and I'll charge $67 for it. And I will write chapter one. I will write on the COVID of the self help book. All of this advice is completely meaningless. You're going to be a sucker and buy this book anyway. And the one lesson that I hope they take away from the book is that I can't give you a meaningful answer. To that.

That's interesting. Let me translate that is you haven't really thought about what it is you do systematically because you could reduce it. And there's some people, I mean I've met brilliant people that this is really clear with athletes. Some are just, you know, the best in the world at something and they, they have zero interest in writing a. Like a self help book but. Or how to master this game. And then there's some athletes who become great coaches and they love the analysis, perhaps the over analysis. And you right now, at least at your age, which is an interesting. You're in the middle of the battle. You're like the warriors that have zero interest in writing books. So you're in the middle of the battle. So you have.

Yeah, this is, this is a fair point. I do think I have a certain aversion to this kind of deliberate, intentional way of living life.

You eventually the hilarity of this, especially since this is recorded, it will reveal beautifully the absurdity. When you finally do publish this book, I guarantee you you will. The story of comma AI. Maybe it'll be a biography written about you. They'll be, they'll be better, I guess.

And you might be able to learn some cute lessons if you're starting a company like comma AI from that book. But if you're asking generic questions like how do I be good at things? Dude, I don't know.

Well, learn. I mean the interesting.

Do them a lot.

Do them a lot. But the interesting thing here is learning things outside of your current trajectory, which is what it feels like from an outsider's perspective. I mean that you know that. I don't know if there's a device on that but it is an interesting curiosity when you become really busy. You're running a company.

Part time.

Yeah, but like there's a natural inclination and trend. Like just the momentum of life carries you into a particular direction of wanting to focus. And this kind of dispersion that curiosity can lead to gets harder and harder with time because you're. You get really good at certain things and it sucks trying things that you're not good at. Like trying to figure them out. You do this with your live streams is you're on the fly figuring stuff out. You don't mind looking dumb. You just figure it out. Figure it out pretty quickly.

Sometimes I try things and I don't figure them out. My chest rating is like a 1400 despite putting like a couple hundred hours and it's pathetic. I mean to be fair, I know that I Could do it better if I did it better. Like, don't play, you know, don't play 5 minute games, play 15 minute games at least. Like I know these things, but it just doesn't, it doesn't stick nicely in my knowledge tree.

All right, let's talk about comma, AI. What's the mission of the company? Let's like look at the biggest picture.

Oh, I have an exact statement. Solve self driving cars while delivering shippable intermediaries.

So long term vision is have fully autonomous vehicles and make sure you're making money along the way.

I think that doesn't really speak to money, but I can talk about what solve self driving cars means. Solve self driving cars, of course, means you're not building a new car, you're building a person replacement. That person can sit in the driver's seat and drive you anywhere. A person can drive with a human or better level of safety, speed, quality, comfort.

And what's the second part of that?

Delivering shippable intermediaries is, well, it's a way to fund the company, that's true, but it's also a way to keep us honest. If you don't have that, it is very easy with this technology to think you're making progress when you're not. I've heard it best described on Hacker News as you can set any arbitrary milestone, meet that milestone, and still be infinitely far away from solving self driving cars.

So it's hard to have real deadlines when you're like Cruise or Waymo, when you don't have revenue. Is revenue essentially the thing we're talking about here?

Revenue is capitalism is based around consent. Capitalism, the way that you get revenue is real capitalism. Commas in the real capitalism camp, there's definitely scams out there, but real capitalism is based around consent. It's based around this idea that if we're getting revenue, it's because we're providing at least that much value to another person. When someone buys $1,000 comma 2 from us, we're providing them at least $1,000 of value or they wouldn't buy it.

Brilliant. So can you give a whirlwind overview of the products that come AI provides like throughout its history and today.

I mean, yeah, the past ones aren't really that interesting. It's kind of just been refinement of the same idea. The real only product we sell today is the Kama 2, which is a.

Piece of hardware with cameras.

So the Kama 2, I mean, you can think about it kind of like a person, you know, in future, hardware will probably be even more and more person. Like, so it has, you know, eyes, ears, a mouth, a brain and a way to interface with the car.

Does it have consciousness? Just kidding. That was a trick question because I.

Don'T have consciousness either. Me and the comment two are the same.

You're the same.

I have a little more compute than it. It only has like the same computer.

Interesting. B, you know, you're more efficient energy wise for the compute.

You're doing far more efficient energy wise. 20 paid flops. 20 watts. Crazy.

You lack consciousness.

Sure.

Do you fear death? You do you want immortality? Does come AI fear death? I don't think so.

Of course it does. It very much fears while it fears negative loss. Oh yeah. Okay.

So comma, so comma two. When did that come out? That was a year ago. No, two, early this year. Wow. Time. It feels like, yeah, 2020. Feels like it's taken 10 years to get to the end.

It's a long year.

It's a long year. So what, what's the sexiest thing about comma 2 feature wise? So I mean, maybe you can also linger on like, what is it? Like, what's its purpose? Because there's a hardware, there's a software component. You've mentioned the sensors, but also like what is of its features and capabilities.

I think our slogan summarizes it well, comma slogan is make driving chill.

I love it.

Okay. Yeah. I mean it is, you know, if you like cruise control, Imagine cruise control.

But much, much more so it can do adaptive cruise control things, which is like slow down for cars in front of it, maintain a certain speed and it can also do lane keeping. So stay in lane and do it better and better and better over time. It's very much machine learning based. So there's cameras, there's a driver facing camera too. What else is there? What am I thinking? So the hardware versus software, so open pilot versus the actual hardware of the device. Can you draw that distinction? What's one, what's the other?

I mean, the hardware is pretty much a cell phone with a few additions. A cell phone with a cooling system and with a car interface connected to it.

And by cell phone you mean like Qualcomm, Snapdragon?

Yeah. The current hardware is a Snapdragon 821. It has Wi Fi radio, it has an LTE radio, it has a screen. We use every part of the cell phone.

And then the interface with the car is specific to the car. So you keep supporting more and more cars.

Yeah. So the interface to the car. I mean, the device itself just has four can buses. It has four can interfaces on it that are connected through the USB port to the phone. And then, yeah, on those four can buses you connect it to the car. And there's a little part to do this. Cars are actually surprisingly similar.

So can is the protocol by which cars communicate. And then you're able to read stuff and write stuff to be able to control the car, depending on the car. So what's the software side? What's Open Pilot?

So I mean, Open Pilot is. The hardware is pretty simple compared to Open Pilot. Open Pilot is. Well, so you have a machine learning model which it's in OpenPilot. It's a, you know, it's a blob. It's just a blob of weights. It's not like people are like, oh, it's closed source. I'm like, it's a blob of weights. What do you expect?

It's primarily neural network based.

Well, OpenPilot is all the software kind of around that neural network that if you have a neural network that says here's where you want to send the car, openpilot actually goes and executes all of that.

It cleans up the input to the neural network. It cleans up the output and executes on it. So connects, it's the glue that connects.

Everything together, runs the sensors, does a bunch of calibration for the neural network does, you know, deals with like, you know, if the car is on a banked road, you have to counter steer against that. And the neural network can't necessarily know that by looking at the picture. So you do that with other sensors and Fusion and Localizer. OpenPilot also is responsible for sending the data up to our servers so we can learn from it, logging it, recording it, running the cameras, thermally managing the device, managing the disk space on the device, managing all the resources in the device.

So what? Since we last spoke, I don't remember when, maybe a year ago, maybe a little bit longer. How has OpenPilot improved?

We did exactly what I promised you. I promised you that by the end of the year you'd be able to remove the lanes. The lateral policy is now almost completely end to end. You can turn the lanes off and it will drive, drive slightly worse on the highway if you turn the lanes off. But you can turn the lanes off and it will drive well trained, completely end to end on user data. And this year we hope to do the same for the longitudinal policy.

So that's the interesting thing. Is you're not doing, you don't appear to be, you can correct me, you don't appear to be doing lane detection or lane marking detection or kind of the segmentation task or any kind of object detection task. You're doing what's traditionally more called like end to end learning. So entrained on actual behavior of drivers when they're driving the car manually.

And this is hard to do, you know, it's not supervised learning.

Yeah, but so the nice thing is there's a lot of data. So it's hard and easy. Right. It's.

We have a lot of high quality data.

Yeah, like more than you need in a sense.

Well, we have way more than we do. We have way more data than we need.

I mean it's, it's an interesting question actually because in terms of amount you have more than you need. But the know driving is full of edge cases. So how do you select the data you train on? I, I think this is an interesting open question. Like what's, what's the cleverest way to select data? That's the question Tesla is probably working on. That's, I mean the entirety of machine learning community. They don't seem to really care, they just kind of select data. But I feel like that if you want to solve, if you want to create intelligent systems, you have to pick data. Well, and so do you have any hints, ideas of how to do it?

Well, so in some ways that is the definition I like of reinforcement learning versus supervised learning. In supervised learning the weights depend on the data and this is obviously true, but in reinforcement learning the data depends on the weights.

Yeah.

And actually both ways.

That's poetry. That's brilliant.

How does it know what data to train on? Well, let it pick. We're not there yet, but that's the eventual.

So you're thinking this almost like a reinforcement learning framework.

We're going to do RL on the world. Every time a car makes a mistake, user disengages, we train on that and do R.L. in the world. Ship out a new model. That's an epoch. Right.

And for now you're not doing the Elon style, promising that it's going to be fully autonomous. You really are sticking to level two. And like it's supposed to be supervised.

It is definitely supposed to be supervising in disengagements. Open Pilot now has an unplanned disengagement about every 100 miles. This is up from 10 miles, like maybe, maybe a year ago. Yeah. So maybe we've seen 10x improvement in a year. But 100 miles is still a far cry from the 100,000 you're going to need. So you're going to somehow need to get three more 10Xs in there.

And what's your intuition? You're basically hoping that there's exponential improvement built into the, baked into the cake somewhere.

Well, that's even, I mean 10x improvement, that's already assuming exponential, right? There's definitely exponential improvement. And I think when Elon talks about exponential like these things, these systems are going to exponentially improve. Just exponential doesn't mean you're getting 100 gigahertz processors tomorrow. Right. Like it's going to still take a while because the gap between even our best system and humans is still large.

So that's an interesting distinction to draw. So if you look at the way Tesla's approaching the problem and the way you're approaching the problem, which is very different than the rest of the self driving car world, so let's put them aside, is you're treating most the driving task as a machine learning problem. And the way Tesla is approaching it is with the multitask learning where you break the task of driving into hundreds of different tasks and you have this multi headed neural network that's very good at performing each task and there's presumably something on top that's stitching stuff together in order to make control decisions, policy decisions about how you move the car. But what that allows you, there's a brilliance to this because it allows you to master each task like lane detection, stop sign detection, traffic light detection, drivable area segmentation, vehicle, bicycle, pedestrian detection. There's some localization tasks in there. Also predicting, predicting how the entities in the scene are going to move. Everything is basically a machine learning task, whether it's a classification, segmentation, prediction. And it's nice because you can have this entire engine, data engine that's mining for edge cases for each one of these tasks. And you can have people like engineers that are basically masters of that task, like become the best person in the world. As you talk about the cone guy for Waymo. Yeah, the good old cone guy becoming the best person in the world at. @ cone detection. So that's a compelling notion from a supervised learning perspective. Automating much of the process of edge case discovery and retraining neural network for each of the individual perception tasks. And then you're looking at the machine learning in a more holistic way. Basically doing end to end learning on the driving task, supervised, trained on the data of the actual driving driving of people that use comma AI like actual human drivers doing manual control. Plus the moments of disengagement that maybe with some labeling could indicate the failure of the system. So you have the, you have a huge amount of data for positive control of the vehicle, like successful control of the vehicle, both maintaining the lane as I think you're also working on longitudinal control of the vehicle and then failure cases where the vehicle does something wrong that it needs disengagement. So like what? Why do you think you're right and Tesla is wrong on this? And do you think you'll come around the Tesla way? Do you think Tesla will come around to your.

Way? If you were to start a chess engine company, would you hire a bishop.

Guy? See we have. This is Monday morning. Quarterbacking is. Yes, probably.

So. Oh, oh, our rook guy. Oh, we stole the rook guy from that company. Oh, we're gonna have real good.

Rooks. Well, there's not many pieces right you can. There's not many guys and gals to hire. You just have a few that work on the bishop, a few that work in the.

Rook. But is that not ludicrous today to think about in. In a world of.

AlphaZero. But AlphaZero is a chess game. So the fundamental question is how hard is driving compared to chess? Because so long term, end to end will be the right solution. The question is how many years.

Away is that end to end is going to be the only solution for.

Level 5, for the only way we get there, of.

Course. And of course Tesla's going to come around to my way. And if you're a rook guy out there, I'm sorry, the cone.

Guy. I don't.

Know. We're going to specialize each task. We're going to really understand rook.

Placement. Yeah, I understand the intuition you have. I mean that, that is very compelling notion that we can learn the task end to end. Like the same compelling notion you might have for natural language conversation. But I'm not sure because one thing you sneaked in there is the assertion that it's impossible to get to level five without this kind of approach. I don't know if that's.

Obvious. I don't know if that's obvious either. I don't actually mean that. I think that it is much easier to get to level five with an end to end approach. I think that the other approach is doable. But the magnitude of the engineering challenge may exceed what humanity is capable.

Of. But what do you think of the Tesla data engine approach which to Me is an active learning task is kind of fascinating is breaking it down into these multiple tasks and mining their data constantly for like edge cases for these different.

Tasks. Yeah, but the tasks themselves are not being learned. This is feature.

Engineering. Yeah, I mean it's a higher abstraction level of feature engineering for the different tasks. It's task.

Engineering. In a sense it's slightly better feature engineering, but it still fundamentally is feature engineering. And if anything about the history of AI has taught us anything, it's that feature engineering approaches will always be replaced and lose to end to end. Now to be fair, I cannot really make promises on timelines, but I can say that when you look at the code for Stockfish and The code for AlphaZero, 1 is a lot shorter than the other, a lot more elegant, required a lot less programmer hours to.

Write. Yeah, but there was a lot more murder of bad agents on the alphazero side. By murder I mean agents that played a game and failed.

Miserably.

Yeah. Oh, in simulation that failure is less costly. Yeah. In. In real world.

It'S. Do you mean in practice like AlphaZero has lost games.

Miserably? No, I haven't seen that. No, but I know. But the requirement for Alpha zero is a simulator to be able to like evolution. Human evolution? Not human evolution, biological evolution of life on earth from the origin of life has murdered trillions upon trillions of organisms on the path to us humans. So the question is, can we stitch together a human like object without having to go through the entirety process of.

Evolution? Well, no, but do the evolution and.

Simulation. Yeah, that's the question. Can we simulate? So do you have a sense that it's possible to simulate some.

Estimates? MU0 is exactly this. MU0 is the solution to this. MU0 I think is going to be looked back as the canonical paper. And I don't think deep learning is everything. I think that there's still a bunch of things missing to get there. But mu0 I think is going to be looked back as the kind of cornerstone paper of this whole deep learning era. And mu0 is the solution to self driving cars. You have to make a few tweaks to it. But mu0 does effectively that it does those rollouts and those murdering in a learned simulator, in a learned dynamics.

Model. It's interesting. It doesn't get enough love that.

I was blown away when I read that paper. I'm like, okay, I've always had a comma. I'm going to sit and I'm going to wait for the solution to self driving Cars to come along this year. I saw it. It's me. A.

Zero.

Yeah. Sit back and let the winning roll.

In. So your sense just to elaborate a little bit, to linger on the topic, your sense is neural networks will solve.

Driving.

Yes. We don't need anything.

Else. I think the same way chess was. Maybe the chess and maybe Google are the pinnacle of search algorithms and things that look kind of like a. The pinnacle of this era is going to be self driving.

Cars. But on the, on the path of that you have to deliver products. And it's possible that the path to full self driving cars will take.

Decades. I doubt.

It. So how long would you put on it? Like what, what do we. You're chasing it. Tesla's chasing it. What are we talking about? 5 years, 10.

Years? Let's say in the 2000 and.

20S. In the 2000 and 20s, the.

Later part of the 2000 and.

20S with the neural network. That would be nice to see. And on the path to that, you're delivering products, which is a nice L2 system. That's what Tesla is doing. A nice L2 system just gets better every.

Time. L2. The only difference between L2 and the other levels is who takes liability. And I'm not a liability guy. I don't want to take liability level 2.

Forever. Now on that little transition, I mean, how do you make the transition work? Is. Is this where driver sensing comes in? Like how do you make the. Because you said 100 miles. Like is. Is there some sort of human factors psychology thing where people start to over trust the system? All those kinds of effects, once it gets better and better and better and better, they get lazier and lazier and lazier. Is that like how do you get that transition.

Right? First off, our monitoring is already adaptive. Our monitoring has already seen adaptive driver.

Monitoring. Is this the camera that's looking at the driver? You have an infrared camera in.

The. Our policy for how we enforce the driver monitoring is seen.

Adaptive. What's that.

Mean? Well, for example, in one of the extreme cases, if the car is not moving, we do not actively enforce driver monitor. If you are going through a, like a 45 mile an hour road with lights and stop signs and potentially pedestrians, we enforce a very tight driver monitoring policy. If you are alone on a perfectly straight highway and this is. It's all machine learning. None of that is hand coded. Actually the stop is hand coded.

But so there's some kind of machine learning estimation of.

Risk.

Yes. Yeah, I mean I've always been a huge fan of that. It's difficult to do. Every step into that direction is a worthwhile step to take. It might be difficult to do really well. Like us humans are able to estimate risk pretty damn well, whatever the hell that is. That feels like one of the nice features of us humans because we humans are really good drivers. When we're really tuned in and we're good at estimating risk. Like, when are we supposed to be tuned.

In? Yeah. And you know, people are like, oh, well, you know, why would you ever make the driver monitoring policy less aggressive? Why would you always not keep it at its most aggressive? Because then people are just going to get fatigued from.

It. Yes. When they get annoyed, you want them. Yeah, they want. You want the experience to be.

Pleasant. And obviously I want the experience to be pleasant. But even just from a straight up safety perspective, if you alert people when they look around and they're like, why is this thing alerting me? There's nothing I could possibly hit right now. People will just learn to tune it out. People will just learn to tune it out, to put weights on the steering wheel, to do whatever to overcome it. And remember that you're always part of this adaptive system. So all I can really say about how this scales going forward is, yeah, something we have to monitor for. We don't know. This is a great psychology experiment at scale, like, we'll.

See. Yeah, it's.

Fascinating. Track it and making sure you have a good understanding of attention is a very key part of that psychology.

Problem. Yeah, I think, I mean, you and I probably have a different. Come to it differently, but to me it's an. It's a fascinating psychology problem to explore something much deeper than just driving. It's. It's such a nice way to explore human attention and human behavior. Which is why again, we've probably both criticized Mr. Elon Musk on this one topic from different avenues. So both offline and online, I had little chats with Elon. And I love human beings as a computer vision problem, as an AI problem. It's fascinating. He wasn't so much interested in that problem is like in order to solve driving. The whole point is you want to remove the human from the picture. And it seems like you can't do that quite yet. Eventually, yes, but you can't quite do that yet. So this is the moment where you can't yet say I told you so to Tesla. But it's getting there because I don't know if you've seen this. There's some reporting that they're in fact starting to do driver.

Model. Yeah, they shift the model in.

Shadow mode with I believe only a visible light camera. It's. It might even be fisheye. It's like a low resolution, low resolution visible.

Light. I mean, to be fair, that's what we have in the Eon as well. Our last generation product. This is the one area where I can say our hardware is ahead of Tesla. The rest of our hardware way, way behind. But our driver monitoring.

Camera. So you think, I think on third row Tesla podcast or somewhere else I've heard you say that obviously eventually they're going to have driver.

Monitoring. I think what I've said is Elon will definitely ship driver monitoring before he ships level.

Five. Before level.

Five. And I'm willing to bet ten grand on.

That. And you bet ten grand on.

That. I mean now, no one to take the bet, but before, maybe someone would have. I should have got my.

Money. Yeah, it's an interesting bet. I think, I think you're right. I'm actually on a human level because he's made the decision, like he said, that drive monitoring is the wrong way to go. But you have to think of as a human, as a CEO, I think that's the right thing to say when sometimes you have to say things publicly that are different than what you actually believe. Because when you're producing a large number of vehicles and the decision was made not to include the camera, like what are you supposed to say? Like, our cars don't have the thing that I think is right to have. It's an interesting thing. But like on the other side, as a CEO, I mean something you could probably speak to as a leader. I think about me as a human. To publicly change your mind on something, how hard is that? Well, especially when assholes like George Hot say I told you.

So. All I will say is I am not a leader and I am happy to change my mind and I.

Will. You think Elon.

Will? Yeah, I do. I think he'll come up with a good way to make it psychologically okay for.

Him. Well, it's such an important thing, man, especially for a first principles thinker, because he made a decision that driver monitoring is not the right way to go. And I could see that decision and I, I could even make that decision like I was on the fence too. Like I'm not. Driver monitoring is such an obvious, simple solution to the problem of attention. It's not obvious to me that just by putting a camera there you solve things. You have to create an incredible, compelling experience. Just like you're Talking about, I don't know if it's easy to do that. It's not at all easy to do that. In fact, I think so. As a creator of a car that's trying to create a product that people love, which is what Tesla tries to do. Right. It's not obvious to me that, you know, as a design decision whether adding a camera is a good idea from a safety perspective either. Like in the human factors community, everybody says that like, you should obviously have driver sensing, driver monitoring. But like that, that's like saying it's obvious as parents you shouldn't let your kids go out at night. But okay. But like, they're still gonna find ways to do drugs. Yeah, you have to also be good parents. So like it's, it's much more complicated than just you need to have driver.

Monitoring. I totally disagree on. Okay, if you have a camera there and the camera's watching the person but never throws an alert, they'll never think about it. Right. The driver monitoring policy that you choose to, how you choose to communicate with the user is entirely separate from the data collection perspective. Right. So, you know, like, there's one thing to say, like, you know, tell your teenager they can't do something. There's another thing to, like, you.

Know, gather the data so you can make informed decisions. That's really interesting. But you have to make that. That's the interesting thing about cars. But even true with comma AI, like you don't have to manufacture the thing into the car is you have to make a decision that anticipates the right strategy long term. So, like, you have to start collecting the data and start making.

Decisions. Started it, started it three years ago. I believe that we have the best driver monitoring solution in the world. I think that when you compare it to Super Cruise is the only other one that I really know that shipped. And ours is.

Better. What, what do you like and not like about Super.

Cruise? I mean, I had a few Super Cruise, the sun would be shining through the window, would blind the camera and it would say I wasn't paying attention, I was looking completely straight. I couldn't reset the attention with a steering wheel touch. And, and Super Cruise would disengage. Like I was communicating to the car. I'm like, look, I am here, I am paying attention. Why are you really going to force me to disengage? And it did. So it's a constant conversation with the user and yeah, there's no way to ship a system like this. Vcan ota. We're Shipping a new one every month. Sometimes we balance it with our users on Discord. Like sometimes we make the driver monitoring a little more aggressive and people complain. Sometimes they don't. You know, we want it to be aggressive as possible where people don't complain and it doesn't feel.

Intrusive. So being able to update the system over the air is an essential component. I mean that's probably to me, you mentioned. I mean to me that is the biggest innovation of Tesla, that it, it made it. People realize that over the air updates is.

Essential. Yeah. Was that not obvious from the iPhone? The iPhone was the first real product that OTA'd, I.

Think. Was it? Actually that's brilliant. You're.

Right. I mean the game consoles used to not. Right. The game consoles were maybe the second thing that.

Did. Wow. I didn't really think about. One of the amazing features of a smartphone isn't just like the touchscreen isn't the thing. It's the ability to constantly.

Update. Yeah, get.

Better. It gets.

Better. Love my iOS.

14. Yeah. One thing that I probably disagree with you on, on driver monitoring is you've said that it's easy. I mean you, you tend to say stuff is easy. I'm sure the. I guess you said it's easy relative to the external perception problem that. Can you elaborate why you think it's.

Easy? Feature engineering works for driver monitoring. Feature engineering does not work for the.

External. So human faces are not human faces and the movement of human faces and head and body is not as variable as the external environment. As your.

Intuition. Yes. And there's another big difference as well. Your reliability of a driver monitoring system doesn't actually need to be that high. The uncertainty. If you have something that's detecting whether the human's paying attention, it only works 92% of the time. You're still getting almost all the benefit of that because the human you're training, the human you're dealing with a system that's really helping you out. It's a conversation, it's not the external thing where guess what? If you swerve into a tree, you swerve into a tree, you get no margin for error.

There. Yeah, I think that's really well put. I think that's exactly the place where comparing to the external perception, the control problem, driver monitoring is easier because you don't. The bar for success is much lower. Yeah, but I, I still think like the human face is more complicated actually than the external environment. But for driving, you don't give a.

Damn. I don't Need. Yeah, I don't need something. I don't need something that complicated to. To. To have to communicate. The idea to the human that I want to communicate, which is yo system might mess up here. You got to pay.

Attention. Yeah, see, that's. That's my love and fascination is the. The human face. And it feels like this is a nice place to create products that create an experience in the car. So, like, it feels like there should be more richer experiences in the car. You know, like, that's an opportunity for like something like comma, AI or just any kind of system like a Tesla or any of the autonomous vehicle companies is. Because software is. And there's much more sensors and so much is on a software, and you're doing machine learning. Anyway, there's an opportunity to create totally new experiences as soon as we.

Get to level three on highways. Okay, enjoy your Candy crush. Enjoy your Hulu, enjoy your, you know, whatever. Whatever. Sure. You get this. You can look at screens basically, versus right now. What do you have? Music and.

Audiobooks. So level three is where you can kind of disengage in stretches of time. Well, you think level three is possible, like on the highway going for 100 miles and you can just go to.

Sleep? Oh, yeah, Sleep. So again, I think it's really all on a spectrum. I think that being able to use your phone while you're on the highway and like, this all being okay and being aware that the car might alert you and you have five seconds to.

Basically. So the five second things you think is.

Possible. Yeah, I think it is. Oh, yeah. Not. Not in all scenarios, right? Some scenarios it's.

Not. It's. The whole risk thing that you mentioned is nice, is to be able to estimate, like, how risky is this situation. That's really important to understand. One other thing you mentioned comparing Cama and autopilot is that something about the haptic feel of the way Kama controls the car when things are uncertain. Like it behaves a little bit more uncertain when things are uncertain. That's kind of an interesting point. And then autopilot is much more confident always, even when it's uncertain, until it runs into trouble. Yeah, that's. That's a funny thing. Actually mentioned that to Elon, I think, and the first time we talked, he wasn't biting. Is like communicating uncertainty. I guess karma doesn't really communicate uncertainty. Explicitly communicates it through haptic. Feel like, what. What's the role of communicating uncertainty, do you.

Think? Oh, we do some stuff explicitly. Like, we do detect the lanes when you're on the highway and we'll show you how many lanes we're using to drive with. You can look at where it thinks the lanes are, you can look at the path and you know, we want to be better about this. We're actually hiring, want to hire some new UI.

People. UI people. You mentioned this because it's such an, it's a UI problem too, right?

It's. We have, we have, we have a great designer now. But you know, we need people who are just going to like build this and debug these UIs. Qt people.

Qt. Is that what the UI is done with.

This? Qt moving? The new UI is in Qt C, Qt. Tesla uses it. Yeah, we had some React stuff in.

There. React JS or just React. React is his own language.

Right? React. Native. React. Native react is a JavaScript framework. Yeah, it's all, it's all based on JavaScript. But it's, you know, I like.

C. What do you think about Dojo with Tesla and their foray into what appears to be specialized hardware for training neural nets? I guess it's something, maybe you can correct me from my shallow looking at it. It seems like something that Google did with TPUs, but specialized for driving.

Data. I don't think it's specialized for driving.

Data. It's just legit, just tpu. They want to go the Apple way. Basically everything required in the chain is done in.

House. Well, so you have a problem right now and this is one of my, one of my concerns. I really would like to see somebody deal with this. If anyone out there is doing it, I'd like to help them if I can. You basically have two options right now to train. Your options are Nvidia or Google. Train. Your options are Nvidia or Google. So Google is not even an option. Their TPUs are only available in Google Cloud. Google has absolutely onerous terms of service restrictions. They may have changed it. But back in Google's terms of service, it said explicitly, you are not allowed to use Google Cloud ML for training autonomous vehicles or for doing anything that competes with Google with Google's prior written.

Permission.

Wow. Okay. I mean Google is not a platform company. I wouldn't, I wouldn't touch TPUs with a 10 foot pole. So that leaves you with the.

Monopoly.

Nvidia.

Nvidia. So I mean, that you're not a fan.

Of. Well, look, I was a huge fan of 2016 Nvidia. Jensen came, sat in the car. Cool guy. When the stock was $30 a share, Nvidia stock has skyrocketed. I witnessed a real change in who was in management over there in like 2018. And now they are. Let's exploit. Let's take every dollar we possibly can out of this ecosystem. Let's charge $10,000 for a one hundreds because we know we got the best shit in the game. And let's charge $10,000 for an A100 when it's really not that different from 3080, which is 699. The margins that they are making off of those high end chips are so high that I mean, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot just from a business perspective because there's a lot of people talking like me now who are like, somebody's got to take Nvidia.

Down.

Yeah. Where they could dominate it. Nvidia could be the new.

Intel. Yeah. To be inside everything essentially. And, and yet the winners in certain spaces, like autonomous driving. The winners only the people who are like desperately falling back and trying to catch up and have a ton of money, like the big automakers are the ones interested in partnering with.

Nvidia. Oh. In there. And I think a lot of those things are going to fall through. If I were in video. Sell chips. Sell chips at a reasonable markup to everybody. To.

Everybody. Without any.

Restrictions. Without any restrictions. Intel did this. Look at Intel. They had a great long run. Nvidia is trying to turn their. They're like trying to productize their chips way too much. They're trying to extract way more value than they can sustainably. Sure. You can do it tomorrow. Is it going to up your share price? Sure. If you're one of those CEOs, like, how much can I strip mine this company? And you know, and that's what's weird about it too. Like the CEO is the founder. It's the same guy. Yeah. I mean I still think Jensen's a great.

Guy. Is.

Great. Why do this? You have a choice. You have a choice. Right now. Are you trying to cash out? Are you trying to buy a yacht? If you are, fine. But if you're trying to be the next huge semiconductor company, sell.

Chips. Well, the interesting thing about Jensen is he is a big vision guy. So he has a plan for 50 years down the road. So it makes me wonder how.

Does price gouging fit into.

It? Yeah. How does that like, it's, it doesn't seem to make sense to.

Plan. I worry that he's listening to the wrong.

People. Yeah, that, that's the sense I have too sometimes because I Despite everything, I think Nvidia is an incredible company. Well, one sort of. I'm deeply grateful to Nvidia for the products they've created in the past.

Right. And so the 1080TI was a great GPU. Still have a lot of.

Them. Still is, yeah. But at the same time it just feels like, feels like you don't want to put all your stock in Nvidia. And so like Elon is doing what Tesla is doing with Autopilot and Dojo is the Apple way is because they're not going to share Dojo with George.

Hotz. I, I, I know they should sell that chip. Oh, they should sell even their accelerator. The accelerator that's in all the cars, the 30 watt one. Sell it. Why.

Not? So open it up like me. Why does this have to be a car.

Company? Well, if you sell the chip, here's what you.

Get.

Yeah. Make some money off the chips. It doesn't take away from your chip. You're going to make some money, free money. And also the world is going to build an ecosystem of tooling for you. Right. You're not going to have to fix the bug in your tanh layer. Someone else already.

Did. Well, the question, that's an interesting question. I mean that's the question Steve Jobs asked, that's the question Elon Musk is perhaps asking is do you want Tesla stuff inside other vehicles? Potentially inside, like IROBOT vacuum.

Cleaner. Yeah. I think you should decide where your advantages are. I'm not saying Tesla should start selling battery packs to automakers because battery packs to automakers, they are straight up in competition with you. If I were Tesla, I'd keep the battery technology totally. This is ours, we make batteries. But the thing about the Tesla TPU is anybody can build that. It's just a question of are you willing to spend the.

Money. It could be a huge source of revenue.

Potentially. Are you willing to spend $100 million? Anyone can build it and someone will. And a bunch of companies now are starting trying to build AI accelerators. Somebody's going to get the idea. Right. And yeah, hopefully they don't get greedy because they'll just lose to the next guy who finally. And then eventually the Chinese are going to make knockoff Nvidia.

Chips. And that's from your perspective. I don't know if you're also paying attention to Stan Tesla for a moment, Dave. Elon Musk has talked about a complete rewrite of the neural net that they're using that seems to again, I'm half paying Attention. But it seems to involve basically a kind of integration of all the sensors to where it's a four dimensional view. You know, you have a 3D model of the world over time and then you can. I think it's done both for the, for the actually, you know, so the neural network is able to in a more holistic way, deal with the world and make predictions and so on, but also to make the annotation task more, you know, easier. Like you can annotate the world in one place and it kind of distribute itself across the sensors and across the different, like the hundreds of tasks that are involved in the Hydra net. What are your thoughts about this rewrite? Is it just like some details that are kind of obvious that are steps that should be taken, or is there something fundamental that could challenge your idea that end to end is the right.

Solution? We're in the middle of a big re right now as well. We haven't shipped a new model.

In a bit of what.

Kind. We're going from 2D to 3D right now. All our stuff, like for example, when the car pitches back, the lane lines also pitch back because we're assuming the flat world hypothesis. The new models do not do this. The new models output everything in.

3D but there's still no annotation. So the 3D is. It's more about the.

Output. Yeah, we have z's and everything. Yeah, we added the Z's, we added the Zs. We unified a lot of stuff as well. We switched from Tensorflow to Pytorch. My understanding of what Tesla's thing is is that their annotator now annotates across the time dimension. I mean, cute. Why are you building an.

Annotator? I find their entire pipeline. I find your vision, I mean the vision event to end very compelling. But I also like the engineering of the data engine that they've created in terms of supervised learning pipelines. That thing is damn impressive. Basically the idea is that you have hundreds of thousands of people that are doing data collection for you by doing their experience. So that's kind of similar to the comma AI model. And you're able to mine that data based on the kind of education you need. I think it's harder to do in the end to end learning. The mining of the right edge cases, like that's where feature engineering is actually really powerful because us humans are able to do this kind of mining a little better. But yeah, there's obvious, as we know, there's obvious constraints and limitations to that.

Idea. Carpathy Just tweeted, he's like, you get really interesting insights if you sort your validation set by loss and look at the highest loss.

Examples.

Yeah. So yeah, I mean you can do we have a little data engine like thing. We're training a Segnet and it's not fancy, it's just like okay, train the new segnet, run it on 100,000 images and now take the 1000 with highest loss, select 100 of those by human, put those, get those ones labeled, retrain, do it again. So it's a much less well written data engine and yeah, you can take these things really far and it is impressive engineering and if you truly need supervised data for a problem. Yeah, things like data engine are the high end of the. What is attention? Is a human paying attention? I mean we're going to probably build something that looks like data engine to push our driver monitoring further. But for driving itself you have it all annotated beautifully by what the human.

Does. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean that applies to driver attention as well. Do you want to detect the eyes, do you want to detect blinking and pupil movement? Do you want to detect all the like face alignments, a landmark detection and so on and then doing kind of reasoning based on that or do you want to take the entirety of the face over time and do end to end? I mean it's obvious that over eventually you have to do end to end with some calibration, some fixes and so on. But it's like I don't know when that's the right.

Move. Even if it's end to end, there actually is, there is no kind of. You have to supervise that. With humans, whether a human is paying attention or not is a completely subjective judgment. You can try to automatically do it with some stuff, but you don't have. If I record a video of a human, I don't have true annotations anywhere in that video. The only way to get them is with other humans labeling it really.

Well. I don't know if you think deeply about it, you could, you might be able to just depending on the task you may be able to discover self annotating things like you know, you can look at like steering wheel reversal or something like that. You can discover little moments of lapse of attention. Yeah, I mean that's, that's where psychology comes in is there indicate because you have so, so much data to look at. So you might be able to find moments when there's like just inattention that even with smartphone, if you want to detect smartphone use. Yeah, you can start to zoom in. I mean that's the gold mine, sort of the comma AI. I mean Tesla is doing this too, right? They're doing annotation based on self supervised learning too. It's just a small part of the entire picture. That's kind of the challenge of solving a problem in machine learning. If you can discover self annotating parts of the problem.

Right. Our driver monitoring team is half a person right now. You know, once we have scaled to a full. Once we have two people, once we have two, three people on that team. I definitely want to look at self annotating stuff for, for.

Attention. Let's go back for a sec to. To a comma and how. What? You know, for people who are curious to try it out. How do you install a comma in say a 2020 Toyota Corolla or like what are the cars that are supported, what are the cars that you recommend and what does it take? You have a few videos out, but maybe through words. Can you explain what's it take to actually install a.

Thing? So we support, I think it's 91 cars, 91 makes and models. We get to 100 this.

Year.

Nice. The 2020 Corolla, great choice. The 2020 Sonata, it's using the stock longitudinal, it's using just our lateral control. But it's a very refined car. Their longitudinal control is not bad at all. So yeah, Corolla Sonata or if you're willing to get your hands a little dirty and look in the right places on the Internet, the Honda Civic is great. But you're going to have to install a modified EPS firmware in order to get a little bit more torque. And I can't help you with that. Comet has not officially endorsed that. But we have been doing it. We didn't ever release it. We waited for someone else to discover it. And then you.

Know. And you have a discord server where people. There's a very active developer community. Yeah, I suppose so depending on the level of experimentation you're willing to do, that's a.

Community. If you just want to buy it and you have a supported car, it's 10 minutes to install. There's YouTube videos, it's Ikea furniture level. If you can set up a table from Ikea, you can install a comma 2 in your supported car and it will just work. Now you're like, oh, but I want this high end feature or I want to fix this bug. Okay, well welcome to the developer.

Community. So what if I wanted to this is something I asked you offline like a few months ago if I wanted to run my own code. So use comma as a platform and try to run something like Open Pilot. What does it take to do.

That? So there's a toggle in the settings called Enable ssh and if you toggle that, you can SSH into your device, you can modify the code, you can upload whatever code you want to it. There's a whole lot of people. So about 60% of people are running stock comma, about 40% of people are running forks. And there's a community of. There's a bunch of people who maintain these forks. And these forks support different cars or they have, you know, different toggles. We try to keep away from the toggles that are like disabled driver monitoring. But, you know, there's some people might want that kind of thing and like, you know, yeah, you can. It's your car. I'm not here to tell you, you know, we, we have some, you know, we ban. If you're trying to subvert safety features, you're banned from our discord. I don't want anything to do with you. But there's some forks doing.

That. Got it. So you encourage responsible.

Forking? Yeah, yeah, we encourage some people, you know. Yeah, some people like, like, there's forks that will do. Some people just like having a lot of readouts on the ui, like a lot of like flashing numbers. So there's forks that do that. Some people don't like the fact that it disengages when you press the gas pedal. There's forks that disable that. Got.

It. Now the, the stock experience is. Is what? Like, so it does both lane keeping and longitudinal control all together. So it's not separate like it is an.

Autopilot. No. So, okay, some cars we use the stock longitudinal control. We don't do the longitudinal control in all the cars. Some cars, the ACCS are pretty good. In the cars, it's the lane keep that's atrocious in anything except for Autopilot and Super.

Cruise. But, you know, you just turn it on and it, it works. What does this engagement look.

Like? Yeah, so we have. I mean, I'm very concerned about mode confusion. I've experienced it on Super Cruise and Autopilot where, like, Autopilot, like Autopilot disengages. I don't realize that the ACC is still on. The lead car moves slightly over and then the Tesla accelerates to like, whatever. My set speed is super fast. I'm like, what's Going on here, we have engaged and disengaged. And this is similar to my understanding. I'm not a pilot, but my understanding is either the pilot is in control or the co pilot is in control. And we have the same kind of transition system. Either open pilot is engaged or open pilot is disengaged. Engage with cruise control, disengage with either gas, brake or.

Cancel. Let's talk about money. What's the business strategy for comma profitable? Well, so you're. Congratulations. What. So basically selling. So we should say comma cost A thousand bucks, comma 2, 200 for.

The interface to the car as well. So it's.

1200. All said that nobody's usually upfront like.

This. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta add the tack on, Right?

Yeah. I love it.

This. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lie to you. Trust me. It will add $1,200 of value to your.

Life. Yes. It's still super.

Cheap. 30 days, no questions asked, money back guarantee. And prices are only going up, you know, if there ever is future hardware cost a lot more than twelve hundred.

Dollars. So comma three is in the works. So it could.

Be. All I, all I will say is future hardware is going to cost a lot more than the current.

Hardware. Yeah, the people that use, the people I've spoken with that use comma, use open pilot, they first of all, they use it a lot. So people that use it, they, they fall in love.

With. Oh, our retention rate is.

Insane. Which is a good sign. Yeah, it's a really good.

Sign. 70% of comma2 buyers are daily active.

Users. Yeah, it's.

Amazing. Oh, also, we don't plan on stopping selling the comma.

2. Like, like it's, you know, so whatever you create that's beyond comma two. It would be, it would be potentially a phase shift. Like, it's, it's so much better that like you could use comma2 and you can use comma whatever, depends what you want. It's.

3.41. Kind of.

40.

Yeah. You know, autopilot. Hardware one versus hardware two. The common two is kind of like hardware.

One. Got it, got it, got it, got it. I think I heard you talk about retention rate with VR headsets that the average is just.

Once.

Yeah. Just fast. I mean, it's such a fascinating way to think about technology. And this is a really, really good sign. And the other thing that people say about comma is like they can't believe they're getting this for a thousand bucks. Right. It seems it seems like some kind of steal, but in terms of like long term business strategies, it basically to put. So it's currently in like a thousand plus cars. Twelve hundred.

More. So yeah, Dailies is about. Dailies is about 2,000 weekly's, about 2,500. Monthly's is over 3,000. Wow, we've grown a lot since we last.

Talked. Is the goal, like, can we talk crazy for a second? I mean, what's the goal to overtake Tesla? Let's talk. Okay, so I mean, Android did overtake iOS. That's exactly it. Right. So they did it. I actually don't know the timeline of that one. They. But let's talk because everything is in alpha now. The autopilot, you could argue, is in alpha in terms of. Towards the big mission of autonomous driving. Right. And so what. Yes. Your goal to overtake to get millions of cars.

Essentially. Of course. Where would it stop? Like it's open source software. It might not be millions of cars with a piece of comma hardware, but yeah, I think open pilot at some point will cross over autopilot in users, just like Android crossed over.

Ios. How does Google make money from Android? It's complicated. Their own devices make.

Money. Google makes money by just kind of having you on the Internet. Google search is built in, Gmail is built in. Android is just a shill for the rest of Google's.

Ecosystem. Yeah, but the problem is Android is a brilliant thing. I mean, Android arguably changed the world. So there you go. You can feel good, ethically speaking, but as a business strategy, it's.

Questionable. Or sell.

Hardware. Sell.

Hardware. I mean, it took Google a long time to come around to it, but they are now making money on the.

Pixel. You're not about money, you're more about.

Winning. Yeah, of course, but if only, if only 10% of open pilot devices come from comma AI, we still make a lot. That is still. Yes, that is a ton of money for our.

Company. But can't somebody create a better comma using open pilot? Or you're basically saying we'll outcompete.

Them. Well, I'll compete. You is, can you create a better Android phone than the Google.

Pixel?

Right. I mean, you can, but like I love.

That. So you're confident, like you know what the hell you're doing. Yeah, it's competence and.

Merit. I mean our money. Yeah, our money comes from. We're a consumer electronics company. Yeah. And put it this way. So we sold, we sold like 3000 comma, 2s, 2500 right now. And like, okay, we're probably going to sell 10,000 units next year. 10,000 units? Even just $1,000 a unit. Okay. We're at 10 million in revenue. Get that up to 100,000, maybe double the price of the unit. Now we're talking like 200 million in.

Revenue. We're talking money. One of the rare semi autonomous or autonomous vehicle companies that are actually making.

Money. Yeah. You know, if you have, if you look at a model when we were just talking about this yesterday, if you look at a model and like you're testing like your A B testing your model and if you're one branch of the A B test, the losses go down very fast in the first five epochs. Yeah, that model is probably going to converge to something considerably better than the one where the losses are going down slower. Why do people think this is going to stop? Why do people think one day there's going to be a great like, well, Waymo is eventually going to surpass you guys. No, they're.

Not. Do you see like a world where like a Tesla or a car, like a Tesla would be able to basically press a button and you like switch to open pilot, you know? You know, they load.

In. I don't know. So I think so first off, I think that we may surpass Tesla in terms of users. I do not think we're going to surpass Tesla ever in terms of revenue. I think Tesla can capture a lot more revenue per user than we can. But this mimics the Android iOS model. Exactly. There may be more Android devices, but you know, there's a lot more iPhones than Google Pixels. So I think there'll be a lot more Tesla cars sold than pieces of common hardware. And then as far as a Tesla owner being able to switch to open pilot, does iOS, does iPhones run.

Android? No, but you can if you.

Really want to do it. But it doesn't really make sense. Like it's.

Not. It doesn't make.

Sense. Who.

Cares? What about if a large company like Automakers4GM, Toyota came to George Hots or on the tech space, Amazon, Facebook, Google came with a large pile of cash. Would, would you consider being purchased? What? Do you see that as a one.

Possible. Not seriously? No. I would probably see how much shit they'll entertain for me. And if they're willing to jump through a bunch of my hoops, then maybe. But no, not the way that M and A works today. I mean we've been approached and I laugh in these people's faces. I'm like, are you kidding? Yeah, because it's so demeaning. The M and A people are so demeaning to companies. They treat the startup world as their innovation ecosystem, and they think that I'm cool with going along with that so I can have some of their scam, fake Fed dollars, you know, fedcoin. What am I going to do with more Fed Coin? You know, Fed Coin, man, I love.

That. So that's the cool thing about podcasting, actually, is people criticize. I know if you're familiar with Spotify Giving Joe Rogan 100 million something about that and, you know, they respect. Despite all the shit that people are talking about Spotify, people understand that podcasters like Joe Rogan know what the hell they're.

Doing.

Yeah. So they give them money and say, just do what you do. And, like, the equivalent for you would be like, george, do what the hell you do because you're good at it. Try not to murder too many people. Like, try. Like there's some kind of common sense. Things like just don't go on a weird rampage.

Of. Yeah. It comes down to what companies I could respect. Right. You know, could I respect gm never? No, I couldn't. I mean, could I respect, like a Hyundai more? So. Right. That's. That's a lot close to.

Yoda. What's.

Your. Nah, nah. Korean is the way. I think. I think that, you know, the Japanese, the Germans, the U.S. they're all too. They're all too. You know, they all think they're too great to be.

Great. What about the tech companies?

Apple? Apple is. Of the tech companies that I could respect, Apple's the closest. Yeah. I mean, I could.

Never. It would be ironic if Comma AI is acquired by.

Apple. I mean, Facebook. Look, I quit Facebook 10 years ago because I didn't respect the business model. Google has declined so fast in the last five.

Years. What are your thoughts about Waymo and its present and its future? Let me start by saying something nice, which is I've visited them a few times, have ridden in their cars, and the engineering that they're doing, both the research and the actual development and the engineering they're doing and the scale they're actually achieving by doing it all themselves is really impressive. And the. The balance of safety and innovation and, like, the cars work really well for the routes they drive. Like, they drive fast, which was very surprising to me. Like, it drives like the speed limit or faster than the speed limit it goes, and it works really damn well. And the interface is.

Nice. And Chandler.

Arizona. Yeah, yeah. In Chandlers, in a very Specific environment. So it's. I, you know, it gives me enough material in my mind to push back against the madman of the world, like a George Hotz to be like. Because you kind of imply there's zero probability they're going to.

Win.

Yeah. And after I've used, after I've written in it, to me, it's not.

Zero. Oh, it's not for technology.

Reasons.

Bureaucracy. No, it's worse than that. It's actually for product reasons, I.

Think. Oh, you think they're just not capable of creating an amazing.

Product? No, I think that the product that they're building doesn't make sense. So a few things. You say the Waymos are fast. Benchmark a Waymo against a competent Uber.

Driver.

Right. The Uber driver is.

Faster. It's not even about speed. It's the thing you said. It's about the experience of being stuck at a stop sign because pedestrians are crossing.

Nonstop. I like when my Uber driver doesn't come to a full stop at the stop sign, you know, and so let's say The Waymos are 20% slower than an Uber. Right. You can argue that they're going to be cheaper. And I argue that users already have the choice to trade off money for speed. It's called Uber Pool. I think it's like 15% of rides are Uber pools. Users are not willing to trade off money for speed. So the whole product that they're building is not going to be competitive with traditional ride sharing networks. And also whether there's profit to be made depends entirely on one company having a monopoly. I think that the level for autonomous ride sharing vehicles market is going to look a lot like the scooter market if even the technology does come to exist, which I question, who's doing well in that market. Yeah, it's a race to the bottom, you.

Know. Well, they could be, it could be closer. Like an Uber and a Lyft where it's just one or two.

Players. Well, the scooter people have given up trying to market scooters as a practical means of transportation. And they're just like, they're super fun to ride. Look at wheels. I love those things. And they're great on that.

Front.

Yeah. But from an actual transportation product perspective, I do not think scooters are viable and I do not think level four autonomous cars are.

Viable. If you, let's play a fun experiment. If you ran, let's do Tesla and let's do Waymo. If Elon Musk took a vacation for a year, he just said, screw it. I'm going to go live on an island, no electronics. And the board decides that we need to find somebody to run the company and they decide that you should run the company for a year. How do you run Tesla.

Differently? I wouldn't change.

Much. Do you think they're on the right.

Track? I wouldn't change. I mean, I'd have some minor changes, but even, even my debate with Tesla about, you know, end to end versus segments, like, that's just software, who.

Cares?

Right? Like, it's not gonna, it's not like you're doing something terrible with Segnets. You're probably building something that's at least going to help you debug the end to end system a.

Lot.

Right. It's very easy to transition from what they have to like an end to end kind of.

Thing. And then I presume you would in the Model Y, or maybe in the Model 3, start adding driver sensing with.

Infrared. Yes, I would add, I would, I would add infrared camera, infrared lights right away to those.

Cars and start collecting that data and do all that kind of.

Stuff. Yeah, very much. I think they're already kind of doing it. It's, it's an incredibly minor change. If I actually were CEO of Tesla, first off, I'd be horrified that I wouldn't be able to do a good job as Elon. And then I would try to, you know, understand the way he's done things.

Before. You would also have to take over his Twitter. So I don't.

Tweet.

Yeah. What's your Twitter situation? Why, why are you so quiet on Twitter? Oh, I mean, comma is like, what, what's your social network presence like? Because you, you on Instagram, you're, you, you do live streams, you're, you're, you're, you understand the music of the Internet, but you don't always fully engage into it. You're part.

Time. Why you still have a Twitter? Yeah, I mean, it's. The Instagram is a pretty place. Instagram is a beautiful place. It glorifies beauty. I like, I like Instagram's values as a network. Got it. Twitter glorifies conflict glorifies, you know, like, like, like, like, like, you know, shots, taking shots at people and it's like, you know, Twitter, Donald Trump are perfectly perfect for each.

Other. So Tesla's on, Tesla's on the right track, in your.

View.

Yeah. Okay, so let's try, let's like really try this experiment. If you ran Waymo, let's say they're, I don't know if you agree? But they seem to be at the head of the pack of the kind of. What would you call that approach? Like, it's not necessarily lighter based because it's not about.

Lighter. Level 4.

Robotaxi. Level 4 robotaxi all in before any, before making any revenue. So they're probably at the head of the pack. If you were said, hey, George, can you please run this company for a year, how would you change.

It? I would go, I would get Anthony Levandowski out of jail and I would put him in charge of the.

Company. Let's try to break that apart. What do you, do you want to make, do you want to destroy the company by doing that? Or do you mean. Or do you mean you like renegade style thinking that pushes that. That like, throws away bureaucracy and goes to first principle thinking? What, what do you mean by.

That? I think Anthony Lewandowski is a genius and I think he would come up with a much better idea of what to do with Waymo than.

Me. So you mean that unironically, he is a.

Genius? Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt. I mean, I'm not saying there's no shortcomings, but in the interactions I've had with him, yeah. He's also willing to take like, who knows what he would do with Waymo. I mean, he's also out there, like far more out there than I.

Am. His big.

Risks.

Yeah. What do you make of him? I was, I was going to talk to him on this podcast and I was going back and forth. I'm, I'm such a gullible, naive human. Like, I see the best in people. And I slowly started to realize that there might be some people out there that like have multiple faces to the world. They're like deceiving and dishonest. I still refuse to, like, I, I just, I trust people and I don't care if I get hurt by it. But like, you know, sometimes you have to be a little bit careful, especially platform wise and podcast wise. What do you. What, what am I supposed to think? So you think, you think he's a good.

Person? Oh, I don't know. I don't really make moral.

Judgments. It's difficult.

To. I mean, this about the Waymo, actually. I mean, that whole idea, very non ironically about what I would do. The problem with putting me in charge of Waymo is waymo is already $10 billion in the hole. Right. Whatever idea Waymo does, look, comma's profitable, comma's raised $8.1 million. That's small. You Know, that's small money. Like, I can build a reasonable consumer electronics company and succeed wildly at that and still never be able to pay back Waymo's 10.

Billion. So I think the basic idea with Waymo. Well, forget the 10 billion because they have some backing, but your basic thing is like, what can we do to start making some.

Money? Well, no, I mean, my bigger idea is like, whatever the idea is that's going to save Waymo, I don't have it. It's going to have to be a big risk idea. And I cannot think of a better person than Anthony Lewandowski to do it. So that is completely what I would do as CEO of Waymo. I would call myself a transitionary CEO, do everything I can to fix that.

Situation.

CEO.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because I can't. I can't do it, right? Like, I can't. I can't. I mean, I can talk about how. What I really want to do is just apologize for all those corny, you know, ad campaigns and be like, here's the real state of the.

Technology. Yeah, they have several criticism. I'm a little bit more bullish on Waymo than, than you seem to be. But one criticism I have is it went into corny mode too early. Like, it's still a startup. It hasn't delivered on anything. So it should be like more renegade and show off the engineering that they're doing, which is. Can be impressive as opposed to doing these weird commercials of like, your friendly. Your friendly car.

Company. I mean, that's my biggest. My biggest snipe at Waymo is always, that guy's a paid actor. That guy's not a Waymo user. He's a paid actor. Look here, I found his call.

Sheet. Do kind of like what SpaceX is doing with the rocket launch is just get. Put the nerds up front, put the engineers up front and just like show failures too.

Just. I Love, I love SpaceX's.

Yeah. Yeah. The thing they're doing is right and it just feels like the.

Right. But we're all so excited to see them.

Succeed.

Yeah. I can't wait to see when it won't fail. You know, like, you lie to me. I want you to fail. You tell me the truth. You be honest with me. I want you to.

Succeed. Yeah. Yeah. And that requires the. The renegade CEO. Right? I'm with you. I'm with you. I still have a little bit of faith in Waymo for, for the renegade CEO to step forward, but it's.

Not. It's not John.

Kraftcheck. Yeah.

It'S. You can't, it's not Chris Armston. And those people may be very good at certain.

Things. Yeah. But they're not renegades because these companies are fundamentally. Even though we're talking about billion dollars, all these crazy numbers, they're still like early stage.

Startups. I mean, and I, I just, I. If you are pre revenue and you've raised $10 billion, I have no idea. Like, like this just doesn't work. No, it's against everything Silicon Valley. Where's your minimum viable product? You know, where's your users? Where's your growth numbers? This is traditional Silicon Valley. Why do you not apply it to what you think you're too big to fail.

Already? Like how do you think autonomous driving will change society? So the mission is for comma to solve self driving. Do you have like a vision of the world, of how it'll be different? Is it as simple as A to B transportation or is there like, because these are.

Robots. It's not about autonomous driving in and of itself. It's what the technology enables. I think it's the coolest applied AI problem. I like it because it has a clear path to monetary value. But as far as that being the thing that changes the world, I mean, no, like there's cute things we're doing in comma, like who'd have thought you could stick a phone on the windshield and it'll drive? But like really the product that you're building is not something that people were not capable of imagining 50 years ago. So no, it doesn't change the world on that front. Could people have imagined the Internet 50 years ago? Only true genius visionaries. Yeah, everyone could have imagined autonomous cars 50 years ago. It's like a car, but I don't drive.

It. See I, I have this sense and I told you like I'm. My long term dream is robots with which you have deep, with whom you have deep connections. Right. And there's different trajectories towards that. And I've been thinking so been thinking of launching a startup. I see autonomous vehicles as a potential trajectory to that. That's not where the direction I would like to go. But I also see Tesla or even comma, AI like pivoting into robotics, broadly defined at some stage in the way like you're mentioning the Internet didn't.

Expect. Let's solve, when I say a comma about this, we could talk about this, but let's solve self driving cars first. Got to stay focused on the mission. You're not too big to Fail for however much I think comma's winning. Like no, no, no, no, no. You're winning when you solve level five self driving cars. And until then you haven't won. And again, you want to be arrogant in the face of other people, great. You want to be arrogant in the face of nature, you're an.

Idiot. Stay mission focused. Brilliantly put. Like I mentioned, thinking of launching a startup I've been considering actually before COVID I've been thinking of moving to San.

Francisco. Oh, oh. I wouldn't go.

There. So why is. Well, and now I'm thinking about potentially Austin and we're in San Diego.

Now. San Diego. Come.

Here. So why? What? I mean you're such an interesting human. You've launched so many successful things. What, why San Diego? What do you recommend? Why not San Francisco? Have you thought so in your case San Diego with Qualcomm and Snapdragon, I mean that's an amazing.

Combination. But that wasn't really.

Why. That wasn't the.

Why. No, Qualcomm was an afterthought. Qualcomm was, it was a nice thing to think about. It's like you can have a tech company here, a good one. I mean, you know, I like Qualcomm, but.

No. Well, so why San Diego better than San Francisco? Why does San Francisco.

Suck? Well, so okay, so first off, we all kind of said like we want to stay in California. People like the ocean, you know, California for, for its flaws. It's like a lot of the flaws of California are not necessarily California as a whole and they're much more San Francisco specific. Yeah, San Francisco. So I think first tier cities in general have stopped wanting growth. Well, you have like in San Francisco, the voting class always votes to not build more houses because they own all the houses and they're like, well once people have figured out how to vote themselves more money, they're going to do it. It is so insanely corrupt. It is not balanced at all political party wise. It's a one party city and.

For all the discussion of.

Diversity.

Yeah. It's has it stops lacking real diversity of thought, of background, of approaches, of strategies, of ideas. It's kind of a strange place that it's the loudest people about diversity and the biggest lack of.

Diversity. Well, I mean that's what they say, right? It's the.

Projection. Projection. Yeah. It's interesting. And even people in Silicon Valley tell me that's like high up people. Everybody is like, this is a terrible place. It doesn't make.

Sense. I mean and coronavirus is really what killed it. San Francisco was the number one exodus during.

Coronavirus. We still think San Diego is a good place to.

Be. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we'll see. We'll see what happens with California a bit longer term. Like Austin's an. Austin's an interesting choice. I don't have really anything bad to say about Austin either, except for the extreme heat in the summer, which, you know. But that's like very on the surface. Right. I think as far as like an ecosystem goes, it's. It's cool. I personally love.

Colorado. Colorado's.

Great. Yeah. I mean you have these states that are, you know, like just way better run. California is, you know, it's especially San Francisco. It's on a thigh horse and.

Like. Yeah. Cascue for advice to me and to others about what's it take to build a successful.

Startup. Oh, I don't know. I haven't done that. Talk to someone who did.

That. Well, this is like another book of years that I'll buy for $67, I suppose. So.

There'S one of these days I'll sell out. Yeah, that's right. Jailbreaks are going to be a dollar and books are going to be.

67. How I. How I Jailbroke the iPhone by George.

Hotz. That's right. How I Jailbroke the iPhone. And you can.

Too, in. In 21 days. That's.

Right. That's.

Right. Oh, God. Okay, I can't wait. But quite so you have an introspective. You have built a very unique company. I mean, not, not you, but you and others. But I don't know, there's no, there's nothing. You have an interest, but you haven't really sat down and thought about like. Well, like if you and I, we're having a bunch of. We're having some beers and you're seeing that I'm depressed and whatever I'm struggling to. There's no advice you can.

Give. Oh, I.

Mean. More.

Beer. More beer. Yeah. I think it's all very like, situation dependent. Here's okay. If I can give a generic piece of advice, it's the technology always wins the better. Technology always wins and lying always loses. Build technology and don't.

Lie. I'm with you. I agree very.

Much. The long run. Long run.

Sure. That's the long.

Run. You know what? The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. True.

Fact. Well, this is, this is an interesting point because I ethically and just as a human believe that like, like hype And Smoke and Mirrors is not, at any stage of the company is a good strategy. I mean, there's some like, you know, PR magic. Kind of like, you know, a new product.

Right. If there's a call to action. If there's like a call to action, like, buy my new gpu. Look at it. It takes up three slots and it's this big. It's huge. Buy my.

Gpu. But like, if you, you know, especially in that, in the AI space, broadly, but autonomous vehicles, like, you can raise a huge amount of money on nothing. And the question to me is, like, I'm against that. I'll never be part of that, I don't think. I hope not willingly not. But like, is there something to be said to essentially lying to raise money, like, fake it till you make it kind of.

Thing? I mean, this is Billy McFarlane, the Fyre Festival. Like we all, we all experienced, you know what happens with that. No, no, don't fake it till you make it. Be honest and hope you make it the whole.

Way. The technology wins.

Right? The technology wins. And like, there is. I'm not used to like, anti hype, you know, that's a Slava KPSS reference, but hype isn't necessarily bad. I loved camping out for the iPhones, you know, and as long as the hype is backed by, like, substance, as long as it's backed by something I can actually buy and like, it's real, then hype is great and it's a great feeling. It's when the hype is backed by lies that it's a bad.

Feeling. I mean, a lot of people call Elon Musk a.

Fraud. How could he be a.

Fraud? I've noticed this is kind of interesting effect, which is he does tend to over promise and deliver. What's. What's the better way to phrase it? Promise a timeline that he doesn't deliver on. He delivers much later on. What do you think about that? Because I, I do that. I think that's a programmer thing too. I do that as well. You think that's a really bad thing to do or is that.

Okay? I think that's again, as long as, like, you're working toward it and you're going to deliver on and it's not too far off. Right, right. Like, like, you know, the whole, the whole autonomous vehicle thing, it's like, I mean, I still think Tesla's on track to, to beat us. I still think even with their, even with their missteps, they have advantages we don't have, you know, Elon is better than me at, like, marshaling massive amounts of resources. So, you know, I still think, given the fact they're maybe making some wrong decisions, they'll end up winning. And, like, it's fine to hype it if you're actually gonna.

Win.

Right? Like, if Elon says, look, we're gonna be landing rockets back on Earth in a year, and it takes four. Like, you know, he landed a rocket back on Earth, and he was working toward it the whole time. I think there's some amount of, like. I think when it becomes wrong is if you know you're not gonna meet that deadline if you're.

Lying. Yeah, that's brilliantly put. Like, this is what people don't understand. I think, like, Elon believes everything he.

Says. As far as I can tell, he.

Does. And I detected that in myself, too. Like, if I. It's only bullshit if you're, like, conscious of yourself.

Lying. Yeah, I think.

So.

Yeah. Now, you can't take that to such an extreme. Right. Like, in a way, I think maybe Billy McFarland believed everything he said.

Too. Right. That's how you start a cult and everybody kills themselves.

Yeah. Yeah. Like.

It'S. You.

Need. You need. If there's, like, some factor on it, it's fine. And you need some people to, like, you know, keep you in check. But, like, if you deliver on most of the things you say and just the timelines are off.

Yeah. It does piss people off, though. I wonder. But who cares? In a long arc of history, the people. Everybody gets pissed off at, the people who succeed. Which is one of the things that frustrates me about this is they don't celebrate the success of others. Like, there's so many people that want Elon to fail. It's so fascinating to me. Like, what is wrong with you? Like, so Elon Musk talks about, like, people short. Like, they talk about financial. But I think it's much bigger than the financials I've seen. Like, the human factors community, they want. They want other people to fail. What? Why? Like, even people. The harshest thing is, like, you know, even people that, like, seem to really hate Donald Trump, they want him to fail, or, like, the other president or they want Barack Obama to fail. It's like. It's weird, but I. I want that. I would love to inspire that part of the world to change because, well, damn it, if the human species is going to survive, we should celebrate success. It seems like the efficient thing to do in this objective function that we're all striving. For is to celebrate the ones that figure out how to do better at that objective function as opposed to dragging them down back into the.

Mud. I think there is. This is the speech I always give about the commenters on Hacker News. So first off, something to remember about the Internet in general is commenters are not representative of the population. I don't comment on anything. You know, commenters are representative of a certain sliver of the population. And on Hacker News, a common thing I'll see is when you'll see something that's like, you know, promises to be wild out there and innovative. There is some amount of checking them back to earth, but there's also some amount of if this thing succeeds. Well, I'm 36 and I've worked at large tech companies my whole life. They can't succeed because if they succeed, that would mean that I could have done something different with my life. But we know that I couldn't have. We know that I couldn't have. And that's why they're going to fail and they have to root for them to fail to kind of maintain their world and much so tune it out and they.

Comment. Well, it's hard. I. So one of the things, one of the things I'm considering startup wise is to change that because I think the. I think it's also a technology problem. It's. It's a platform.

Problem. I.

Agree. It's like because the thing you said, most people don't comment. I think most people want to comment, they just don't because it's all the. For.

Commenting. Exactly. I don't want to be grouped in with them on.

That. You don't want to be in a, at a party where everyone is an. And so they. But that's a platform problem.

That's. I can't believe what Reddit's become. I can't believe the group think.

In Reddit comments there's a red is interesting one because they're subreddits and so you can still see especially small.

Subreddits.

Yeah. That like, that are little like havens of like joy and positivity and like deep even disagreement but like nuanced discussion. But it's only like small little pockets but that's, that's emergent. The platform is not helping that or hurting that. So I guess naturally something about the Internet, if you don't put in a lot of effort to encourage nuance and positive good vibes, it's naturally going to decline into.

Chaos. I would love to see someone do this well, yeah, I think it's, yeah, very.

Doable. This is I think actually so I feel like Twitter could be.

Overthrown. Yoshua Bach talked about how like, if you have like and retweet like that's only positive wiring. Right. The only way to do anything like negative there is with a comment and that's like, that asymmetry is what gives Twitter its particular toxicness. Whereas I find YouTube comments to be much better because YouTube comments have a, have a, have an up and a down and they don't show the down.

Votes. Without getting into depth of this particular discussion, the point is to explore possibilities and get a lot of data on it because I mean I could disagree with what you just said. The point is it's unclear. It hasn't been explored in a really rich way. Like these questions of how to create platforms that encourage positivity. I think it's a technology problem and I think we'll look back at Twitter as it is now. Maybe it'll happen within Twitter but most likely somebody overthrows them is we'll look back at Twitter and say, can't believe we put up with this level of.

Toxicity. You need a different business model too. Any social network that fundamentally has advertising as a business model. This was in the social dilemma, which I didn't watch but I liked it. It's like, you know, there's always the, you know, you're the product, you're not the. But they had a nuanced take on it that I really liked and it said the product being sold is influence over you. The product being sold is literally your, you know, influence on you. Like that can't be. If that's your idea. Okay, well, you know, guess what? It cannot be.

Toxic. Yeah, maybe there's ways to spin it like with, with giving a lot more control to the user and transparency to see what is happening to them as opposed to in the shadows as possible. But that can't be the primary source.

Of. But the users aren't. No one's going to use.

That. It depends. It depends. It.

Depends. I think, I think that the, you're, you're not going to, you.

Can'T. We'll look back at Twitter and say, can't believe we put up with this level of.

Toxicity. You need a different business model too. Any, any social network that fundamentally has that depend on self awareness of the.

Users. It's a, it's another, it's a longer discussion because you can't depend on it, but you can reward self awareness. Like if for the Ones who are willing to put in the work.

Of advertising as a business model. This was in the social dilemma which I didn't watch but I liked it. It's like, you know, there's always the, you know, you're the product, you're not the. But they had a nuanced take.

On it that self awareness. You can reward them and incentivize and perhaps be pleasantly surprised. How many people are willing to be self aware on the Internet like we are in real life. Like I'm putting in a lot of effort with you right now being self aware about if I say something stupid or mean. Sure, I'll like look at your like body language. Like I'm putting in that effort. It's costly for an introvert. Very costly. But on the Internet it like most people are like, I don't care if it. If this hurts somebody. I don't care if this is not interesting or if this is. Yeah mean or.

Whatever. I think so much of the engagement today on the Internet is so disingenuous. You're not doing this out of a genuine. This is what you think you're doing. This just straight up to manipulate others. Whether you're in. You just became an.

Ad. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about a fun topic which is programming. Here's another book idea for you. Let me pitch what's your perfect programming setup. So like this by George.

Hotz. So I really like and it said the product being sold is influence over you. The product being sold is literally your, you know, influence on you. That can't be if that's.

Your. Oh, like.

What? Listen, you're give me a MacBook Air, sit me in a corner of a hotel room and you know I'll still.

Have. So you really don't care. You don't fetishize like multiple monitors.

Keyboard. Those things are nice and I'm not going to say no to them. But do they automatically unlock tons of idea? Okay, well you know, guess what? It can't not be toxic. Yeah, productivity. No, not at all. I have definitely been more productive on a MacBook Air in a corner of a hotel.

Room. What about ide? So which operating system do you love? What text editor do you use? Ide? What is there something that is like the perfect. If you could just say the perfect productivity setup for George.

Hotz. Doesn't matter. It literally doesn't matter. You know I guess I code most of the time in vim. Like literally I'm using an editor from the 70s. You know, you didn't make Anything better. Okay. VS code is nice for reading code. There's a few things that are nice about it. I think that you can build much better tools. How like IDA's Xrefs work way better than VX VS.

Codes. Why Maybe there's ways to spin it like with. With giving a lot more control to the user. Yeah. Actually that's a good question like why I. I still use. Sorry Emacs for most. I've actually never. I have to confess something.

Dark.

Yeah. So I've never used bim. It's a transparency to see what is happening to them as opposed to in the shadows as possible but that can't be the primary source.

Of. But the users aren't. No one's gonna use.

That. It depends. It depends. It.

Depends. I think. I think that the. You're. You're not going to. You.

Can'T. I think maybe I'm just afraid that my life has been a. Like a waste. I'm so. I'm not. I'm not evangelical about emacs. I. I think.

This. This is how I feel about TensorFlow versus.

PyTorch.

Yeah. Having just like we've switched everything to Pytorch now put months into the switch. I have felt like I've wasted years on TensorFlow. I can't believe it. I can't believe how much better Pytorch.

Is.

Yeah. I've used Emacs and Vim. Doesn't.

Matter. Yeah. Still just my. My heart. Somehow I fell in love with Lisp. I don't know why you can't. The heart wants what the heart wants. I don't. I don't understand it but it just connected with me. Maybe it's the functional language at.

First I connect with depend on self awareness of the.

Users. It's a. It's another. It's a longer discussion because maybe it's because so many of the AI courses before the deep learning revolution were taught you can't depend on it but you can reward self awareness like if for the ones who are willing to put in the work of Will Lisp in mind. I don't know. I don't know what it is but I'm. I'm stuck with it. But at the same time like why am I not using a modern ID for some of these programming. I don't.

Know. They're not that much better I've used modern ID used them but at.

The same time so to just when not to the self awareness you can reward them and incentivize and perhaps be Pleasantly agree with you. But like, I like multiple monitors. Like, I've, I have to do work on a laptop and it's a, it's a pain in the ass. And also I'm addicted to the Kinesis weird keyboard. You could, you could. Yeah, yeah. So you don't have any of that. You can just be in a. On a.

MacBook. I mean, look at work. I have three 24 inch monitors. I have a happy hacking keyboard, I have a Razer death header.

Mouse. Like, but it's not essential for.

You.

No. Let's go to a day in the life of George Hotz. What is the perfect day, productivity wise? So we're not talking about like Hunter S. Thompson drugs and price. How many people are, are willing to be self aware on the Internet? Let's, let's look at productivity like, what, what's the day like we are in real life? Like, I'm putting in a lot of effort with you right now being self aware about if I say something stupid or mean, I'll like, look at your, like, body language look like, like hour by hour. Is there any regularities that create a magical George Hot.

Experience? I can remember three days in my life and I remember these days vividly when I've gone through kind of radical transformations to the way I.

Think. Like I'm putting in that effort. It's costly for an introvert, very costly. But on the Internet and what.

I would give, I would pay $100,000 if I could have one of these days tomorrow. The days have been so impactful and one was first discovering Eliezer Yudkowski on the Singularity and reading that stuff and like, you know, my mind was blown. The next was discovering the Hutter Price and that AI is just compression. Like finally understanding Aixi and what.

All day in the life of George Hotz. What is the perfect day, productivity wise? So we're not talking about like Hunter S. Thompson drugs and let's, let's look at productivity. Like what, what's the day look like? Like hour by hour. Is there any regularities that create.

That was, you know, I like read about it when I was 18, 19. I didn't understand it. And then the fact that like lossless compression implies intelligence. The day that I was shown.

That. And then the third, it, like most people are like, I don't care if it, if this hurts somebody. I don't care if this, this is not interesting or if this is. Yeah, mean or.

Whatever. I think so much of the engagement today on the Internet is so disingenuous one is controversial. The day I found a blog called Unqualified Reservations and you're not doing this out of a genuine. This is what you think you're doing this just straight up to manipulate others Read.

That. And I was like wait, which one is that? That's. What's the guy's.

Name? Courtesy.

Arvin. Yeah. So many people tell me I'm supposed to talk to.

Him. Yeah, he.

Looks. He sounds insane or brilliant but insane or both. I don't.

Know. The day I found that blog was another like this was during like like Gamergate and kind of the run.

Up to a magical George Hots.

Experience. I can remember three days in my life and I remember these days vividly when I've gone through kind of radical transformations to the way I think and what I would give I would pay $100,000 if I could have one of these days tomorrow the 2016 election. And I'm like wow, okay the world makes sense now this like I had a framework now to interpret this just like I got the framework for AI and a framework to interpret technological progress like those days when I discovered these new frameworks or oh interest whether you're. You just became an.

Ad. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about a fun topic which is programming. Here's another book idea for you. Let me pitch what's your things it's not about but what. What was special about those days? How did those days come to be? Is it just you got lucky? Like sure. Like well you just encountered hotter prize on. On hacking news or something like that. Like.

What? But you see I don't think it's just See I don't think it's just that like I could have gotten lucky at any point. I think that in a way.

You were ready at that.

Moment. Yeah.

Exactly. Perfect programming setup. So like this by George Hotz so like what Listen, you're to receive the information but is there some magic to the.

Day? The days have been so impactful and one was first discovering Eliezer Yudkowski on the singularity and reading that stuff and like you know my mind was.

Blown today of like like eating breakfast and it's the mundane things.

Nothing. Nah I drift through I drift through life without the next was discovering the Hutter price and that AI is just compression like finally understanding AIXI and what all structure I drift through life hoping and praying that I will get.

Another day like those days and there's nothing in particular you do to to be a receptacle for another for day number.

Four. No, I didn't do anything to get the other ones. So I don't think I have to really do anything now. I took a month long trip to New York, a MacBook Air. Sit me in a corner of a hotel room and you know I'll still.

Have. So you really don't care? You.

Don'T. I mean the Ethereum thing was the highlight of it, but the rest of it was pretty terrible. I did all of that was, you know, I like read about it when I was 18, 19. I didn't understand it. And then the fact that like lossless comes a two week road trip and I got. I had to turn.

Around. I had to turn around, fetishize, like multiple monitors, keyboard, those.

Things. I'm driving in Gunnison, Colorado. I passed through Gunnison. Depression implies intelligence. The day that I was shown that. And then the third and the snow starts coming down. There's a pass up there called Monarch Pass. In order to get through to Denver, you got to get one. It's controversial. The day I found a blog called Unqualified Reservations and read that and.

I was like, wait, which one is that? That's. What's the guy's.

Name? They're nice and I'm not going to say no to them, but did they automatically unlock tons of it over the Rockies? And I had to turn my car around. I couldn't. I watched. I watched a F150 go off the road. I got to go back. And like that day was meaningful because like, like it was real. Like I actually had to turn my car around. It's rare that anything even real happens in my life. Even as, you know, mundane is the fact that, yeah, there was snow. I had to turn around, stay in Gunnison and leave the next.

Day. Something about that moment felt real. Okay, so actually it's interesting to break apart the three moments you mentioned if it's okay. So I always have trouble pronounced.

Courtesy.

Arvin. Yeah. So many people tell me I'm supposed to talk to.

Him. Yeah, he.

Looks. He sounds insane or brilliant, but insane or both. I don't know his name, but allows a.

Yakovsky. Yeah. Productivity. No, not at all. I have definitely been more productive on a MacBook Air in a corner of a hotel room. The day I found that blog was another like this was during like, like Gamergate and kind of the run up to the 2016 election. And I'm like, wow, okay, the world makes sense.

Now. So what. How did your world view change in starting to consider the. The exponential growth of AI and AGI that he Thinks about and the. The. The threats of artificial intelligence and all that kind of ideas. Like, can you. Is it just like, can you maybe break apart? Like what. What about.

Ide? So this, like, I had a framework now to interpret this. Just like I got the framework for AI and a framework to.

Interpret. Which operating system do you love? What text.

Edit. Technological progress. Like those days when I discovered these new frameworks.

Were. Oh, interesting. So it's not about. But what. What was special about those days? How did those days come to be? Is it just you got lucky? Like, sure. Like what do you use ide? What is there. Is there something that is like you just encounter hotter prize on. On Hacker News or something like that? Perfect. If you could just say the perfect productivity set up for George Hart. Like.

What? But you see, I don't think it's just. See, I don't think it's just that, like I could have gotten lucky at any point. I think that in a way.

You were ready at that.

Moment. Yeah.

Exactly. To receive the information. But is there some magic to the date? Exactly. Was so magical to you? Is it a transformational.

Experience? Today everyone knows him for threats and AI safety. This was pre that stuff. There was, I don't think, a mention of AI safety on the page. This is old Yakowski stuff. He'd probably denounce it all now. He'd probably be like, that's exactly what I didn't want to happen. Sorry.

Man. Is there something specific you can take from his work that you can.

Remember? Yeah, it was this realization that computers double in power every 18 months and humans do not. And they haven't crossed yet. But if you have one thing that's doubling every 18 months and one thing that's staying like this, you know, here's your log graph, here's your line. You know, you calculate.

That. And that. Did that open the door to the exponential thinking, like, thinking that like, you know, what with technology we.

Can. It doesn't.

Matter. Doesn't. Doesn't.

Matter. It really doesn't matter. You know, I guess I code.

Most of the time in Vim actually transformed the.

World. It opened the door to human obsolescence. Like, literally, I'm using an editor from the 70s, you know, you didn't.

Make anything better today of like. Like eating breakfast. And it's the mundane.

Things. It opened the door to realize that in my lifetime, humans are going to be.

Replaced. And then the matching idea to that of artificings.

Nothing. Nah. I drift.

Through. I drift through life without.

Structure. I drift through life Hoping and praying that I will get another day like those.

Days. Intelligence with a Hutter Prize. You know, I'm torn and there's nothing in particular you do to. To be a receptacle. I go back and forth on what I think about it but the basic thesis is a nice compelling notion that we can reduce the task of creating an intelligent system, a generally intelligent system, into the task of compression. So you can think of all of intelligence in the universe in fact as a kind of.

Compression. Yes, code is nice for reading code. There's a few things that are nice about it. I think that you can build.

Much. Do you find that. Was that just at the time you found that another for day number.

Four? No, I didn't do anything to.

Get the other ones as a compelling idea or do you still find that a compelling.

Idea? I still find that a compelling idea. I think that it's not that useful day to day but. Oh, I don't think I have to really do anything now. I took a month long trip to New York. Actually one of maybe my quests before that was a search for the definition of American. I mean the Ethereum thing was the highlight of it, but the rest of it was pretty terrible. I did the word intelligence and I never had one and I definitely have a definite two week road trip and I had to turn around. I had to turn around. Shouldn't have the word compression. It's a very simple straightforward one. And you know what compression is? You know what lossless is? Lossless compression. Not lossy lossless compression. And that, that is equivalent to intelligence, which I believe. I'm not sure how useful that definition is day to day but like I now have a framework to understand what it is and he's just. Better tools how like IDA's Xrefs work way better than VX VS codes. Why I'm driving in Gunnison, Colorado. I passed through Gunnison and yeah.

Actually that's a good question. Like why I. I still use. Sorry email 10x the the prize for that competition like recently a few months ago. You ever thought of taking a crack at that.

Age? Oh, I did. Oh I did. I spent. I spent the next. And the snow starts coming down this pass up there called Monarch Pass in order to get through to Denver. You gotta get. After I found the prize, I spent the next six months of my life trying it and well that's when I started learning everything about AI and then I worked in Vicarious IT over the Rockies and I had to turn my car around. I couldn't I watched. I watched a F150 go off the road. I'm like, I gotta go back.

And for most, I've actually never. I have to confess something for a.

Bit. And then I learned. Read all the deep learning stuff and I'm like, okay, now I like, I'm caught up to modern.

AI.

Wow. And I had. I had a really good framework to put it all in from the compression.

Stuff.

Right. Like some of the first. Some of the first deep learning models I played with were GPT. GPT basically. But before Transformers, before it was still dark.

Yeah. So I've never used BIM, it's.

RNNs to do character.

Prediction. But by the way, on the compression side, I mean the especially neural.

Networks, like that day was meaningful because it was real. I actually had to turn my car around. It's rare that anything even real happens in my life. Even as, you.

Know. What do you make of the lossless requirement with the Hutter Prize? So, you know, human intelligence and neural networks can probably compress.

Stuff. Pretty mundane is the fact that, yeah, there was snow. I had to turn around, stay in Gunnison and leave the next.

Day. Something about that moment felt real. Okay. So actually it's interesting to break apart. I think maybe I'm just afraid that my life has been afraid. Like a waste. I'm so. I'm not. I'm not even judging. Well, but it would be lossy. It's.

Imperfect. You can turn a lossy compressor into a lossless compressor pretty easily using an arithmetic encoder. Right. You can take an arithmetic encoder and you can just encode the noise with maximum efficiency. Right. So even if you can't predict exactly what the next character is, the better a probability.

Distribution. You can put helical by emacs. I think.

This. This is how I feel about Tenderflow versus.

Pytorch. Yeah. Part the three moments you mentioned if it's okay. So I always have trouble pronouncing his name, but allows a.

Yakovsky.

Yeah. So what. How did your world view.

Change? But over the next character you can then use an arithmetic encoder to. Right. You don't have to.

Know. Starting to consider the. The exponential growth of AI having.

Just like we've switched everything to Pytorch now put months into the switch. I have felt like I. Oh. Whether it's an E or an I, you just have to put good probabilities on them and then, you know, code those. And if you have. It's a bits of entropy thing.

Right. So let Me on that topic. It'd be interesting as a little side tour. What are your thoughts in this year about GPT3 and these language models and these transformers? Is there something interesting to you as an AI researcher or is there something interesting to you as an autonomous vehicle.

Developer? Nah, I think. I think it's overhyped. I mean it's not like it's cool. It's cool for what it is. But no, we're not just going to be able to scale up to GP. Wasted years on TensorFlow. I can't believe it. I can't believe how much better.

AGI that he thinks about and the threats of artificial intelligence and all that kind of idea ideas. Like can you. Is it just like can you maybe break apart? Like what exactly was so magical to you is a transformational experience today.

Everyone knows him for threats and AI safety. This was pre that stuff. There was. I don't think I'm G12 and get general purpose intelligence. Like your loss function is literally my.

Torches.

Yeah. I've used emacs and Vim. Doesn't.

Matter. Yeah. Still just my heart. Somehow I fell in love with Lisp. I don't know why you can't. The heart wants what the heart.

Wants. Just, you know. You know, cross entropy loss on the.

Character.

Right. Like that's not the loss function of general.

Intelligence. Is that obvious to.

You?

Yes. Can you imagine that? Like to play devil's. I don't. I don't understand it. But it just connected with me. Maybe it's the functional language at first. I connect advocate on yourself. Is it possible that you can. The GPT12 will achieve general intelligence with something as dumb as this kind of loss.

Function? I guess it depends what you mean by general intelligence. So there's another problem with the GPTs. Mention of AI safety on the page. This is. This is old Yukowski stuff. He'd probably denounce it all now. He'd probably be like that's exactly what I didn't want to happen. Sorry man. And that's that they don't have a. They don't have long term.

Memory.

Right. So like just GPT12 a scaled up version of GPT2 or.

3. Maybe it's because so many of the AI courses before the deep learning revolution were taught. Is there something specific you can take from his work that you can.

Remember? Yeah. It was this realization that I find it hard to.

Believe. Well you can scale it in. It's. Yeah. So it's a hardcore to hard coded length. But you can with Lisp in mind. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but I'm. I'm stuck with it. But it make it wider and wider and.

Wider. Yeah, you're gonna get. You're gonna get cool things from those systems, but I don't think you're ever gonna get something that can like, you know, build me a rocket ship. What about computers? Double in power every 18 months and humans do not. And they haven't crossed yet. But if you have one thing that's doubling every 18 months and one.

At the same time, like why am I not using a modern IDE for some of these programming? I don't know. They're not solved driving. So you know, you can use.

Transformer with video thing that's staying like this. You know, here's your log graph.

Here'S your line here, for example. You think, is there something in.

There? No, because I mean, look, we use. We use a gru, we use a groove. We could change that grew out to a transform. You know, you calculate.

That and that the dead.

Warmer. I think driving is much more Markovian than language.

So. Markovian, you mean like the memory? Which. Which aspect of.

That. Much better I've used modern ideas.

To. But at the same.

Time, I mean that most of the information in the State at T minus 1 is also in state T. I.

See.

Yeah. Right. And it kind of like drops off nicely like this. Whereas.