Hi
My name is George hotz I play a character named Geo hot on the internet
[I] used to hack cell phones and now I build self-driving cars
You may have seen me in Bloomberg last December. I had a self-driving car. [I] still do
but now I have a company as well, and now we have a self-driving car, and we have an incredible self-driving car and
by the end of the year
For under [$1000] you [two] will be able to have an incredible self-driving car
And this isn't like you got to bring it to some guy and he's going to do it
We want to put it on Amazon prime
We want to make it go to Amazon [prime] search "self-driving car", add to cart
It'll be here in two days
and then this is easy to set up as a piece of ikea furniture if you think that's easy and
Then you have a self-driving car, and that's our dream
We're Comma ai
Look good?
Three two one we were so proud okay max speed set 65
My hands are off the wheel
Now you know solid steel solid green ones there the core knows what it's doing
So I will have to make some lane changes up ahead
Notice how we did a merge right there? Whoa that guy hit the brakes hard. Yes?
He did yeah, we hit the brakes hard, [too]. Now. You've programmed it for
Two car lanes three car lengths all we programmed it for 1.7 seconds
But we drive very conservatively um because [I] need time to intervene right if the car messes up, so this is all the car
Right now we don't want to get off this exit. So I'm just gonna nudge it over a little bit here without disengaging autonomy
Okay, so just a tiny little alright little nudge right and now I can just let it go and [it'll] recover and pull us right
back into the lane
Okay, now we're coming up to a turn on the road here coming up your turn on the road here, okay,
Well, it likes to drive. Oh, we've set it for 65
This is a little aggressive. It is kind of a lot honestly it's a little surprising that it is quite. This aggressive aggressive tonight
Do you find that it has a little bit of a personality? I thought you'd like a little more aggressive
No, you say when it's being aggressive tonight
Do you find that it does a little bit of personality yeah, but yeah
This is a pretty and it is accelerating into this turn. Whoa take your job
Yeah, whoo take you around that turn and it's it's up to 65 now
I mean we can do let's see if we can stop behind this stationary car, so this is something. That's fairly tricky
You know um it would did see it now. It sees it, but it's a little bit late on that
So what are you gonna? Do to make sure that's that that's a bug. That's that's a bug
Yeah
But stopping behind a a stopped car should be like the first thing it should do by the way
It would have stopped you would not have [enjoyed] it, okay
Um it did see the car it just saw it late, okay?
Right so like I said everything this car does should be conservative if its aggressive. [I] take back go back, okay?
I'm like right now. It's gonna solid fix on where we're now here again right coming up on a stationary vehicle
It's probably gonna late break
If it breaks at all so don't say that to me dude five
four three
Oh, no, there goes. I was that's now that was all car os still good still gone. Oh boy
I wouldn't do it until we got to want it saw him at plenty of room that
[was] those a smooth breaking that was that was pretty smooth that right. Three is about when I start to hit the brakes
Ya know that was you would hear that ding if I had stepped in right right like I swear to God that's true right
There's no trickery. No, no, that's true. Yeah. Oh, yeah, no, did you feel unsafe at any time?
I mean a little
But did the car do anything sketchy is what I'm saying, no
No, it was more aggressive than I thought that it was going to system is [reengage], [okay]?
It was aggressive, but it wasn't tailgating no no. No it wasn't tailgating
It sped up because I had the thing set at 65 right some [people] like to go fast
So here these little these green lines are what it thinks are the lanes
But my lanes are obviously not all wiggy woggy like that. They're straight. Oh, no
No, that's just because we moved a little bit in the lanes
[oh] wow okay, so that's actually our this here is our car
And that's our position in the lanes, so a little bit to the right now
But now we're centering out again, okay? Yeah
So I'm gonna let this guy pass us and [then] [I'm] going to resume manual control in three two
one, let go.
I feel so much safer. [hahaha]. Do you. yeah? He's having this 26 year
Old kid driving around driving me around trust me. I don't know yet alright
I don't know. I mean. I think this kind of stuff is people are gonna have to
Get used to it in stages right? Yeah, you know and that's the thing right
You saw how easy it was to disengage the system, right?
put this system in your car and
then
You know grow with it, right?
Trust it for a second, trust it for two, trust it for 10, get in the back seat have sex
Is this even legal?
without a doubt so
What we're building?
Is a lot more following the precedence of driver assistance systems. I'll have a little bit about this in the presentation, but
because
We the user is still you know liable and in control of the vehicle at all times?
It's a lot more like cruise control
But it helps you out a whole lot more than cruise control does so even though
We did get a cease and desist from the California DMV
They don't understand what their own laws say under their own laws. We've consulted with many legal experts
This is absolutely legal.
Do what do their laws say? Their laws Prohibit an autonomous vehicle where an autonomous vehicle is defined as a vehicle without
vehicle driven without human monitoring. If you're in the driver's seat, [you're] watching
It's technically not an autonomous vehicle
And then the law goes on to specifically exempt lane keeping assist systems and adaptive cruise control systems
Which is you know largely what our system is we keep you in the lane
We make sure you don't hit anything in front of you. That's highway driving
That's traffic driving, and that's even quite a bit of city driving. So how is it any different from for example
what's already in a lot of volvo cars where you've got
adaptive cruise control or having keeping assist yes, yep, and you have lane keeping assist and you turn it on and
It'll start taking the wheel and they'll be like. Oh, I don't wanna cross that lane line. Oh, I don't across that lane line
[oh]
I don't across that and literally it bounces back and forth you'll get pulled over for driving drunk um
What we are a lot more like is tesla autopilot
Which is actually a system that feels I see the future of self-driving cars
Not this hyper conservative automaker if we make it too good they might use it can't have them using it
right as literally
It's literally like
In every shipping car today except for the tesla these systems are just atrocious. The fact that we've built what we built so quickly
Compared to you know these manufactured they've been working on it for years, and they don't even have what  we have right. Even tesla
It's not if they didn't build that [now] they license [mobileye] right we've built an in-house solution
That works in some cases better than tesla in like nine months the reason we were able to do this so quickly
huge Advances in Machine learning
huge Advances in with machine learning, okay
Um we do not code in the rules of the driving problem we learn from hours and hours and hours of data
So when you see you learn about hours of it you go out you drive the car and then you take that data that happens
Put it into your [computer] and then [the] computer learns that way yep, okay, so that means that the car we're going to drive today
Will have essentially be you driving
Jake's tons of driving Ricardo's done some driving, mostly the three of us, but we have a product announcement today and
We're hoping to get a whole lot more drivers. I'm listening
How do we succeed?
Big Data, how do we get big data from the world Let's have the world teach us to drive
so announcing the first product of Common AI.
It's dropcam
plus
fitbit for your car and
You can earn incredible comma points
By just driving
Mount our app our app is called
chauffeur
well, we were gonna call it chauffeur, but we realized that nobody knows how to spell chauffeur, so we
Got rid of some of the letters only it's a tiny chauffeur. It's not a big shelf. It's tiny
It's just a little Chffr
first product of comma.ai
Well, you said app
It is a phone. I did say. I'm not supposed to say app um
But yeah, so that Chffr right there go ahead and [open] it up
Yeah, we want you to mount that on
The windshield of your car and point that out and point that out in such a way that you would feel comfortable
driving from the feet
Okay
Um so you mount that up on your windshield?
It automatically starts logging. It's also a dropcam plus fitbit it records all that data. It's a dashcam
Incredibly useful if you get into an accident or someone does something sketchy you [have] that logged in the cloud
It's also fitbit you can see all of your routes
You can see where you drive you can see how long your commutes taken every day for people who are really into that stuff
So is this app? I will be free. [oh]. Yeah, definitely yeah
Yeah, we're honestly our thousand dollar price point does not reflect a huge profit for us either um
We just want to get these things in [it] many cars as possible
[we] want to get this thing into users hands to me that that's worth so much more than
Nickel and Diming. Why?
Why? I think it's cool
I mean part of it, too is like
I'm really interested in artificial intelligence right and building huge [datasets] that can
Teach an AI about the world
so
Kids do nothing for like the first two years they kind of just sit there you have to feed them and they're looking around
Right they're learning about the world when you look at the data rate going into that baby's brain. It's insanely high there's so much data
bigger than any
Probably bigger than any at least human annotated data set that's out there not bigger than like the amount of Youtube videos that's larger
but um
We need datasets of that magnitude if we want to train human level AIs
so that's I
Care a lot [more] about that than I do about you know making a profit of users
There's so many other monetization routes here
Um you know and eventually eventually well we're not gonna lose money on the hardware right we don't [wanna] sell these [things] in a loss
But you know it's not like we're building these things for 50 bucks and selling [5000] if we can build them for 50 bucks
We'll sell them for 60
so yeah, I'm an idiot um I come to Las Vegas, right?
And I thought it'd be cool professor that in Vegas sure thanks is awesome. [uh]
But have you have actually looked at a road in Las Vegas? Yeah, I thought yeah, so this is [a] road, right
They don't just suck
They don't have lane markings
Well, I'm gonna do they're just not painted [their] [bots] dots. So mobile eye had to spend
engineering time to write a special detector for Botts dots
And it doesn't work very well [um] you can read the tesla user [forums] about people trying to use it around the Vegas area um
and
You know you don't want to have two detectors because then you have an if statement to switch between them
So we have a saying at comma AI, "if statements kill people", um
our car has literally never seen bott dots like that before so
two nights before and [crashed] my friend's place in La looking on [street] [view]
Like they're everywhere. You can't get away from them.
We get here, [and] it doesn't work. It doesn't work at all
But then we looked at what time of day it was, it's dusk
Our car has dynamic range issues [at] dusk
As soon as the sun fell it started working on [Botts] [dots]
Woke up this morning worked Flawlessly
despite never having seen them before
Mobile eye spends engineering time and can't build something that works
Our system is so robust and reliable that it drives on something that's never seen before because a human would obviously think [they're] lanes
Right and there's a lot of other
Intuition in that in that highway image that I'm showing you look look at [where] like the tire tracks are right
You can look at all of that and understand. This is how I should drive, and that's what makes us
So different from every other approach out there because that's what it is
The hard part of this is not building the thing with the motor that can turn the steering wheel on the gas and the brakes
It's writing the software that can take sensors figure out what to do and [actual] do it
Well, we didn't get to spend too much time with George Hotz and his self-driving Acura, but he's based in San Francisco
We're based in San Francisco
Maybe we can meet up again soon. We don't know yet
If this product's going to be successful, but I for one can't wait till the end of the year to find out
