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Vehicle Autonomy At Least 10 Years Away, According to Comma AI Founder And Says Tesla is a Profitable Company and Waymo Is Not

Vehicle autonomy is at least 10 years away, according to George Hotz, the founder of Comma AI. He also made it clear that Tesla is a profitable company and Waymo Is not.
Vehicle Autonomy At Least 10 Years Away, According to Comma AI Founder And Says Tesla is a Profitable Company and Waymo Is Not

Vehicle Autonomy

The dream of Tesla and Elon Musk is to one day have autonomous vehicles on the road, capable of driving people around without a drive to navigate. This will drastically lower the cost of transportation. He also says that Tesla is profitable and Waymo is not.

The reason he mentioned Tesla and Waymo is that Waymo has cars without drivers in small locations, but they cannot scale to the globe.

The question is, is George Hotz, the founder of Comma AI, who said this, correct?

Of all the people on the earth qualified to make a statement like this, George is pretty high on the list to do so. He has a better understanding of software and autonomous vehicles than I do.

Does that mean we should all take this at face value and expect autonomous vehicles around 2035?

Let's take a dive into this.

Autonomous Vehicles Timeline

There are many different timelines given for autonomous vehicles. Some think it will be just a few years before we have autonomous vehicles. Others, like George, think it will be much longer.

For autonomous vehicles to be ready in 2025, it means that Tesla's FSD version 12 (or possibly 13 at that time), will need to show drives without disengagement OR intervention for the vast majority of the time.

And I don't mean 99% of the time. I mean 99.99999% of the time. It has to be so abundantly and obviously clear that a Tesla can drive autonomously ALL THE TIME, that regulators have no choice but to allow it.

For 2025 to be a reality, there truly needs to be exponential improvements in Tesla's FSD software that is now using "nothing but neural nets." Without that, I'm afraid it will be longer.

For a 2035 timeline and level 5 autonomy, this seems like the safer prediction to make. Nobody really understands autonomy and neural networks except the few software engineers closely involved in these projects - or others in the AI field that are constantly working on machine learning projects.

The key thing here for the case of 10+ years is reaching that 99.99999%, or "march of 9's" accuracy in driving that shows not just an improvement with autonomous vehicles, but a MASSIVE leap in safety. Only then, will autonomous vehicles flood the roads.

It's just a matter of how fast the technology progresses now, and Tesla is at the forefront of making this happen.

I don't think anyone really knows. Tesla could have a breakthrough this year, in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years - nobody really knows because this is likely the hardest problem in software that has ever been attempted.

George says this about Autonomous Cars:

Exactly. Limited scope will be sub 10, like eyes off driving on highway. But a fully autonomous car needs to be a general agent. It's a long road, but I think it's sub 20 years for human level agentic AI. I've devoted my life to this problem.

He has also said that Tesla will reach level 5 autonomy first, and Comma AI will be a couple of years behind that. He refers to Comma AI as "Android" in an interview with Lex Fridman. Furthermore, he also says gathering data and putting real users behind the car is the only strategy that works.

One thing is for certain - this doesn't stop Tesla's mission whatsoever. It is to transition the world to sustainable energy. The compact and sub-compact cars will need to be built. New Gigafactories will need to be built. More Megapacks will need to be built.

Full self-driving will get "fully" solved one day, the big question is, when?

When do you think we will have truly autonomous vehicles on the road?

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Hi! I'm Jeremy Noel Johnson, and I am a Tesla investor and supporter and own a 2022 Model 3 RWD EV and I don't have range anxiety :). I enjoy bringing you breaking Tesla news as well as anything about Tesla or other EV companies I can find, like Aptera. Other interests of mine are AI, Tesla Energy and the Tesla Bot! You can follow me on X.COM or LinkedIn to stay in touch and follow my Tesla and EV news coverage.

Image Credit: Lex Fridman

Article Reference: George Hotz on X

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