George Hotz: Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets | Lex Fridman Podcast #132
the following is a conversation with george hotz a.k.a geohot 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 comma two device for one thousand dollars that when installed in many of their supported cars can keep the vehicle centered in the lane 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 non-linear out of the box brilliance and the fact that he's a superstar programmer of a very different style than myself styles make fights and styles make conversations so i really enjoyed this chat i'm sure we'll talk many more times on this podcast quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode first is four sigmatic the maker of delicious mushroom coffee second is the coding digital a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that i listen to and enjoy and finally expressvpn 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 semiautonomous vehicles led me to study the human side of autonomy 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 super crews are collecting gives us a chance to understand how we can design safe semiautonomous 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 enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars and up a podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman 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 the intelligent civilizations existed but they've blown themselves up so your general intuition is that intelligent civilizations quickly like there's that parameter in in the drake equation your senses they don't last very long yeah how are we doing on that like have we lasted pretty pretty good i don't know we do oh yeah i mean not quite yet well what telly has your caskey 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 i don't think we've seen anywhere near the worst of it yet world's going to get weird well maybe a mu can save the world you thought about that the meme lord elon musk fighting on the side of good versus the uh the meme lord of the darkness which is uh not saying anything bad about donald trump but he is the the lord of the meme on the dark side he's a 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 percent of marriages end in divorce uh why doesn't your marriage end up there you can't just say happily ever after so it's the thing about destruction is it's over after the destruction um we have to do everything right in order to avoid it and uh one thing wrong i mean actually that's what i really like about cryptography cryptography it seems like we live in a world where the defense wins um 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 uh the offense has the advantage there um so maybe our future is in crypto but uh so cryptography right the goliath is the the defense and then all the different hackers are the uh 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 uh 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 the 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 um stimulate stimulate their pleasure centers uh 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 uh i took that number from star trek voyager i don't know how true it is but um uh yeah that's not big right 70 000 light years is nothing for some possible technology that you can imagine that could 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 uh didn't happen so something stopped it so you mean if you right for for like a few million years if you sent out probes that travel close what's sublight meaning close to the speed of light let's it just spreads interesting actually that's an interesting calculation huh so what makes you think that would be able to uh communicate with them like uh yeah what what's why do you think we would able 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 uh that'd be a really cool universe to live in um 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 uh what you're referring to with with entropy and then these these pockets of interesting complex computations 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 uh and you can never overcome the problem of waste heat so where is their 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 could have a fundamentally different physics you know like that that we just don't even compromise 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 oh 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 um would people from the past be able to detect the remnants of our uh we 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 right the humans who were lying around in the desert probably didn't even have maybe they just barely had fire uh they would understand if a 747 flew overhead in in in this vicinity but not um if the 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 we're just sending out random like 50s tracks of music true and yeah i mean they'd have to you know the we've only been broadcasting radio waves for um 150 years and well there's your light cone so yeah okay what do you make about all the i recently came across this uh having talked to david fravor i don't know if you caught what the the videos that pentagon released and uh 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 a guest 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 then 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 closing is real yeah i listened to the uh i think it was bob lazar um on joe rogan and like 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 uh what do you mean like they they uh you know they made some weird thing and they called it an alien spaceship you know maybe it was just to like stimulate young physicist minds we'll 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 uh i've heard a conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories were invented by the cia in the 60s to discredit true things yeah um so you know you can go to ridiculous conspiracy theories like flat earth and pizzagate and uh 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 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 are like oh we can't censor things anymore i know what we'll do you know it's the old story of uh the story of like tying a flag where the leprechaun tells you the 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 uh you know you're you're an incredible programmer outside of everything else we'll talk about just as a programmer uh 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 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 um 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 uh wouldn't be that crazy well it's difficult to compile like dna to python and then to see i mean there is a little bit of a gap in in the kind of languages we use for for uh 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 um so i think in that sense we actually completely understand it the problem is um you know well simulating on these cad models i played with it a bit this year is super uh computationally intensive if you want to go down to like the molecular level um where you need to go to see a lot of these phenomena like protein folding um so yeah it's not that it's it's not it's not that we don't understand it it just requires a whole lot of compute to kind of compile it for our human minds it's inefficient both for the pro for the data representation and for the programming yeah it runs well on raw nature it runs well in raw nature and when we try to build uh emulators or simulators for that uh well then manslaughter and i've tried it it runs in yeah you've commented elsewhere i don't remember where that uh 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 um like if we're talking about covid and viruses and so on yeah if you were trying to engineer some kind of defense mechanisms like a vaccine uh against coven 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 i'm not sure about that i think you can do tons of uh 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 i'm not libraries and i'm not pipetting like you're handing me a i gotta no 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 toronto's videos they were a joke it's like it's like a little gantry it's like a little 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 going to happen but like right now if you are asking me to pipette 50 milliliters of solution amount this is so crude yeah okay let's get all the crazy out of the way uh so a bunch of people ask 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 uh i think that this we 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 brand new five theory search for exploits right i think we're nowhere near actually there yet my hope with that was just more to like 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 you are bites 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 uh we should humble ourselves that we we get to uh like what what are we humans in this bite code yeah and not just just humble ourselves but like like i'm not trying to like make you feel 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 from twitter to 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 like or or what is 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 of capitalism i don't think that's really the game we're playing right now i think we're playing a a different game where the rules are rigged look at 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 sergeant drop 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 a lot more cruel than we humans want to put up with or at least we see it as cool it's like the bigger thing eats the smaller thing and uh 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 one no comma two 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 uh open world and mmorpg and um you know here it's open world i mean if that's the game you want to play you can play that game but isn't that isn't that beautiful i know if you play diablo they used to have uh 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 uh 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 in cow level i mean the number of hours i spent in cow level i'm not like the most impressive person because people have 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 you don't like those games you don't you don't think that's us humans failing the the yeah 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 like 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 cause you got a long time what if mortality makes the game just totally not fun i mean like why do you assume immortality is uh somehow uh 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 um 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 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 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 a symptom of uh the finiteness of life like without that finiteness your curiosity would vanish like like a like a morning fog all right cool then you talked about love like that then um 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 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 with deceiving oh change oh rico changing the code if that's the problem right if the problem is that i will no longer have that that curiosity i'd like to have backup copies of myself uh which yeah 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 of like those wavenets those like logarithmic go back to the copies yeah but sometimes it's not reversible like uh 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 all so it's also possible that if we figure out immortality that all of us will kill ourselves before we advance far enough to uh to be able to revert to change i'm not killing myself till i know everything so that's what you say now because your life is finite you know i think yes self-modifying systems gets 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 uh a simulation in that our our universe is a kind of computer program running in a computer that's more of a thought experiment um do you also think of the potential of the sort of uh 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 uh if it's totally unfalsifiable then who cares i mean what do you think that experiment would look like like somebody uh 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 is some power to be gained so get an indication that there you can discover and exploit cracks in the simulation or it doesn't you know 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 what kind of technology scrying what's that oh that's a weird uh this crying is the is the uh paranormal ability to uh like like remote viewing like being able to see somewhere where you're not um so you know i don't think you can do it by chanting in a room but um if we could find as a memory leak basically yeah you're able to access parts you're not supposed to yeah yeah yeah and thereby discover shortcut yeah maybe memory leak means the other thing as well but i mean like yeah like an ability to read arbitrary memory yeah right and that one's not that horrifying right the the right ones start to be horrifying read right so the 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 community and then for me from computer science person like you stephen wolfram's theory of everything of like hypographs 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 like what would make me pay attention and like why like i hate string theory is okay make a testable 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 um can i just 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 um yo i want i want i want the clarity of that i want 100 gigahertz processors i want transistors that are smaller than atoms i want like power that's uh 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 hearts 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 uh 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 uh 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 fame this is wrong and ran into a bunch of folks from a company in a crypto company who are trying to scale up ethereum and they had a technical deadline related to a solidity to ovm compiler so these are all ethereum technologies so you stepped in they recognized you uh pulled you aside explained their problem and you stepped in and helped them solve the problem uh thereby creating legend status story so uh can you uh tell me the story the little more detail it seems kind of incredible this 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 um they 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 uh every ethereum node has to run every transaction on the ethereum network um and this kind of doesn't scale right because if you have n computers well you know if that becomes two n computers you actually still get the same amount of compute right this is this is like like o of one scaling um because they all have to run it okay fine you get more blockchain security but like the blockchain's already so secure can we trade some of that off for speed uh so that's kind of what these l2 solutions are they built this thing which kind of um kind of sandbox uh for ethereum contracts so they can run it in this l2 world and it can't do certain things in l world in l1 i can ask you for some definitions what's l2 oh l2 is layer 2. so l1 is like the base ethereum chain and then layer two is like a computational layer that runs um 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 uh is not turn complete well ethereum is not technically a terrain complete with a gas limit but close enough well the gas limit what's the gas limit resources yeah i mean no computers actually turn complete right right you're fine at ram you know what if i can actually solve this gas limit you just have so many brilliant words i'm not even gonna ask but that's what that's no that's not my word that's ethereum's word gasoline ethereum you have to spend gas per instruction so like different op codes use different amounts of gas and you buy gas with ether to prevent people from basically ddosing the network so uh bitcoin is proof of work and then what's ethereum it's also proof of work uh they're working on some proof-of-stake ethereum 2.0 stuff but right now it's it's proof of work usually a different hash function from bitcoin that's more asic resistance because you need ram so we're all talking about ethereum 1.0 yeah so what uh what were they trying to do to scale this whole process so they were like well if we could run contracts elsewhere um and then only save the results of that computation uh you know well we don't actually have to do the computer 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 uh because you know you just have to make sure that like the person who is saying look i swear that this is the real computation i'm staking ten thousand dollars on that fact and if you prove it wrong yeah it might cost you three thousand dollars in gas fees to prove wrong but you'll get the ten thousand dollar bounty so you can secure using those kind of systems um so it's effectively a sandbox which runs contracts uh and like just like any kind of normal sandbox you have to like replace syscalls with um you know calls into the hypervisor uh sandbox this calls hypervisor what do these things mean uh as long as it's interesting to talk about yeah i mean you can take like the chrome is maybe the one to think about right so the chrome process that's doing a rendering uh 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 system you can't make it open says call no no no uh you have to request from the kind of uh hypervisor process or like i don't know what's called in chrome but um 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 um so that's yeah uh so what's the in the context of ethereum what are the boundaries of the sandbox that we're talking about um well like one of the calls that you actually reading and uh writing any state to the ethereum contract to the ethereum blockchain um 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 right to the ethereum blockchain um so layer two is except is really sitting on top of layer one so you're gonna 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 so solidity is the language that most ethereum contracts are written in it compiles to a byte code and then they wrote this thing they called the transpiler and the transpiler took the byte code 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 3000 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 byte code change things about it and then reconstruct it and i mean as soon as i hear this i'm like why don't you just change the compiler right why not the first place you build the bytecode just do it in the compiler uh so yeah you know i asked them how much they wanted it uh of course measured in dollars and i'm like well okay um and yeah and you wrote the compiler yeah i modified i wrote a 300 line diff to the compiler uh it's open source you can look at it yeah it's yeah i looked at the code last night [Laughter] yeah exactly cute good is a good word for it uh and it's um c plus plus see if it's lost yeah so when asked how you were able to do it you said you just gotta think and then do it right so can you break that apart a little bit what's what's your process of uh one thinking and two doing it right you know they they the people i was working for are 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 because 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 yeah what are your thoughts on crypto in general so would what 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 um 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 um is wild and like you know satoshi nakamoto people always ask me who i look up to it's like whoever that is who do you think it is i mean elon musk is it you it is definitely not me and i do not think it's elon musk but yeah this idea of uh 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 um 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 really oh i never thought of it that way it's hilarious so python i'm paying i'm paying um you know even 10 cents an hour i'll use the nice azure machine i can run python for 10 cents an hour lawyers cost a thousand dollars an hour so python is is is 10 000 x uh better on that axis um lawyers don't always return the same answer um python almost always does uh cost yeah i mean just just cost reliability everything about python is so much better than lawyers um so if you can make smart contracts this whole concept of code is law i i love and i would love to live in a world where everybody accepted that fact so so maybe uh you can talk about what smart contracts are so let's say um let's say you know we have a uh even something as simple as a safety deposit box right safety deposit box that holds a million dollars i have a contract with the bank that says two out of these three parties uh must uh be present to open the safety deposit box and get the money out so that's a contract for the bank and it's only as good as the bank and the lawyers right let's say you know somebody dies and now oh we're going to go through a big legal dispute about whether oh well was it in the will was it not in the well what like 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 that's what all businesses want 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 yeah i wonder how many agreements in this world because we're talking about financial transactions only in this case correct the smart the smart contracts oh you can go to you can go to anything you can go you could put a prenup in the theorem blockchain a married smart contract sorry divorce lawyers sorry you're going gonna be replaced by python uh okay so that's uh so that's 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 is there like what's your intuition about the space are you just sitting back and watching the chaos and look who cares what emerges oh i don't 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 you know what yeah not great like the block size debate or 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 people people can look it up but i'm like wow you know ethereum seems the governance of ethereum seems much better um i've come around i've been on proof of stake ideas uh you know very smart people thinking about some things yeah you know governance is interesting it does feel like uh vitalik it could just feel like an open in even in these distributed systems leaders and 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 mattel right yeah brilliant leaders are not necessarily yeah so you think the reason he's uh he's the face of a theorem is because he's a genius that's interesting i mean that was um it's interesting to think about that we need to create systems in which uh 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 right what's the integral of two to the x yeah i i'd love to see those questions asked and that's what i want as our leader it's it's a little bit of a bayes rule yeah i mean even oh wow you're hurting my brain it's that 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 uh 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 they know all the documents involved and it's and that 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 right that's what great programmers do but yeah it would be uh it's really unfortunate that those kinds of people aren't emerging as 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 uh you could imagine that in a hundred years that'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 uh we'll use a less controversial example um this was actually in my joke uh app in 2012 i was like barack obama mitt romney let's let him 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 um which forks companies should be able to fork i'd love to fork nvidia you know yeah like different business strategies and yeah and then try them out and see see what works like even take uh uh yeah take comedy i 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 could actually do that yeah please take come 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 uh 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 i will write i will write chapter one i will write on the cover of the self-help book all of this advice is completely meaningless you're gonna be a sucker and buy this book anyway yeah 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 that's something and they they have zero interest in writing 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 isn't interesting you're in the middle of the battle you're like the warriors that have zero interest in writing books uh 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 um this kind of deliberate intentional way of living life here eventually the hilarity of this especially since this is recorded it will reveal beautifully the absurdity when you finally do publish this book and i guarantee you you will the story of comma ai would be 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 i 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 uh you know that i don't know if there's an advice 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 the 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 you're on the fly figuring stuff out you don't mind looking dumb you just figured 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 in 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 five-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 it doesn't really speak to money but i can talk i can talk about what solve self-driving cars means solve self-driving cars of course means um you're not building a new car you're building a person replacement uh 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 um is well it's a way to fund the company that's true but it's also a way to keep us honest uh 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 like real deadlines when you're like cruz or waymo when uh you don't have uh revenue is that i mean is revenue essentially the thing we're talking about here revenue is is capitalism is based around consent capitalism the way that you get revenue is kind of real capitalism commas in the real capital is in camp there's definitely scams out there but real capitalism is based around consent it's based around this idea that like if we're getting revenue it's because we're providing at least that much value another person when someone buys a thousand dollar comment two from us we're providing them at least a thousand dollars of value where they wouldn't buy it brilliant so can you give a whirlwind overview of the products that come i provides like uh 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 uh the real only product we sell today is the comma two which is a piece of hardware with cameras um so the comet to i mean you can think about it kind of like a person uh you know when future hardware will probably be even more and more person-like um so it has uh you know eyes ears a mouth a brain uh 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 common two are the same they're the same i have a little more compute than it it only has like the same computer interesting b uh you know you're more efficient energy wise for the compute you're doing far more efficient energy-wise huh 20 paid flaps 20 watts crazy you lack consciousness sure do you fear death you do you want immortality does comey i fear death i don't think so of course it does it very much fears while it fears negative loss oh yeah okay so come a comma two when did that come out that that was a year ago no two uh early this year wow time it feels like yeah 2020 feels like uh it's taken 10 years to get to the end it's a long year it's a long year so um what uh what's the sexiest thing about comma too feature-wise so i mean maybe you can also link 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 uh 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 uh do adaptive cruise control things which is like slow down for cars in front of it maintain a certain speed and you can also do lane keeping so staying in the lane and doing it better and better and better over time that's very much machine learning based so this camera is there's a driver facing camera too that's um what else is there what am i thinking so the hardware versus software so open pilot versus the actual hardware of the device what's 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 connecting to it and as by cell phone you mean uh like qualcomm snapdragon uh yeah the current hardware is a snapdragon 821 uh it has wi-fi radio it has an lte radio it has a screen uh we use every part of the cell phone and then the interface of the car is specific to the car so you keep supporting more and more cars um yeah so the interface to the car i mean the device itself just has four can buses has four cam interfaces on it that are connected through the usb port to the phone um and then yeah on those four can buses uh you connect it to the car and there's a little harness to do this cars are actually surprisingly similar so can is the 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 um so i mean open pilot is the hardware is pretty simple compared to open pilot open pilot is uh well so you have a machine learning model which it's an open pilot 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 um you know primarily neural network based ul open pilot 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 it 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 uh 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 with other sensors infusion 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 of the device so what um since we last spoke i don't remember when maybe a year ago maybe a little bit longer how uh has open pilot 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 um the lateral policy is now uh 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 um 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 lean 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 and trained 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 uh so the nice thing is there's a lot of data so it's hard and easy right it's uh we have a lot of high quality data yeah like more than you need in the senate well we 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 you 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 uh that's i mean the entirety of machine learning can be 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 right and so would 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 right um and this is obviously true but the uh in reinforcement learning the data depends on the weights yeah right and actually both ways that's that's poetry so it's brilliant how does it know what data to turn 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 our all in the world ship out a new model that's an epoch right and uh 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 oh it is definitely supposed to be supervising reinforced the fact that it's supervised um we look at our rate of improvement in disengagements um open pilot now has an unplanned engagement about every 100 miles this is up from 10 miles like maybe maybe uh maybe a year ago yeah so maybe we've seen 10x improvement in a year but a hundred miles is still a far cry from the hundred thousand you're going to need so you're going to somehow need to get um three more 10xs in there and your what's your intuition uh you're basically hoping that there's exponential improvement built into the baked into the cake somewhere well that's even like 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 is a machine learning problem and the way tesla is approaching it is with the multi-task learning where you break the task of driving into hundreds of different desks and you have this multi-headed neural network that's very good at performing each task and there there's presumably something on top that's stitching stuff together in order to uh make controlled 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 um master each task like lane detection uh stop sign detection traffic light detection uh drivable area segmentation uh you know vehicle bicycle pedestrian detection uh there's some localization tasks in there also predicting of like yeah predicting how the the entities in the scene are going to move like everything is basically a machine learning task well there'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 becoming the best person in the world that uh as you talk about the cone guy for uh for for waymo the good old phone guy the the becoming the best person in the world at uh at uh at cone detection i i so that's a compelling notion from a supervised learning perspective automating much of the process of educates 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 of people that use comma ai like actual human drivers do manual control plus the moments of disengagement that uh 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 as i think you're also working on longitudinal control of the vehicle and then failure cases where the vehicle does something wrong that needs disengagement so like what why do you think you're right and tesla is wrong on this and do you think 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 uh this is monday morning quarterbacking as uh yes probably [Laughter] 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 uh yeah 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 the world of alpha zero but alpha zero is jessica so the 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 five for the only way we can of course and of course tesla's gonna 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 gonna specialize each task we're gonna really understand rook placement yeah i understand the intuition you have i mean that that uh is very compelling notion that we can learn the task and to end like the same compelling notion you might have for natural language conversation 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 uh 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 so 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 but the tasks themselves are not being learned this is feature engineering yeah i mean it's it's a 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 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 alpha zero one 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 uh agents on the uh alpha zero side by murder i mean uh agents that played a game and failed miserably yeah oh in simulation that failure is less costly yeah in in real world it's wait do you mean in practice like alpha zero has lost games miserably no well i haven't seen that no but i know but the the the 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 yeah so the question is can can we uh stitch together a human-like object without having to go through the entirety process of evolution well no but do the evolution in simulation yeah that's the question can we simulate so do you have a sense that's possible to simulate some mu zero is exactly this mu zero is is the solution to this mu zero i think is going to look 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 mu zero i think is going to be looked back as the kind of cornerstone paper um of this whole deep learning era and mu zero is the solution to self-driving cars you have to make a few tweaks to it but mu0 does effectively that it does those roll outs and those murdering in in a learned simulator in a learned dynamics model it's interesting it doesn't get enough love i was blown away when i i was blown away when i read that paper i'm like you know okay i've always had a comma i'm gonna sit and i'm gonna wait for the solution to self-driving cars to come along this year i saw it it's me zero yeah so uh sit back and let the winning roll in so your sense just to elaborate a little bit to link on the topic your senses in your networks will solve driving yes like we don't need anything else i think the same way chess was maybe the chess and maybe google are the pinnacle of like search algorithms and things that look kind of like a star um the pinnacle of this era is going to be self-driving cars but 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 are we you're chasing it tesla's chasing it what are we talking about five years 10 years 50 years in the 2020s in the 2020s the later part of the 2020s with the neural network well 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's doing a nice l2 system i'm just going to do 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 want to take liability level 2 forever now on that little transition i mean how do you make the transition work is uh 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 factor 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 is 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 scene adaptive what's that mean well for example in one of the extreme cases um if you uh if the car is not moving we do not uh actively enforce driver monitor right um if you are going through a uh like a 45 mile an hour road with lights um and stop signs and potentially pedestrians we enforce a very tight driver monitoring policy if you are alone on a perfectly straight highway um 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 that that's uh because 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 uh because like we humans are really good drivers when we're really like 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 you they want you want the experience to be pleasant 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 you know how this scale is 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 a 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 uh so both offline and online i had little chats with elon and like i love human beings as a as a as a computer vision problem as an ai problem it's fascinating he wasn't so much interested in that problem it's 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 and you can't yet say i told you so uh 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 drive them off yeah they ship the model in shadow mode uh without uh i believe only a visible light camera it might even be fisheye uh 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's ahead of tesla the rest of our hardware way way behind but our driver monitoring camera do you think uh i think on the third row tesla podcast or somewhere else i've heard you say that obviously eventually they're gonna have driver monitoring i think what i've said is elon will definitely ship driver monitoring before he ships level five the beautiful level and i'm willing to about 10 grand on that and you better ground on that uh i mean now i want to take the bet but before maybe someone would have i should have got my money yeah that's an interesting bet i think i i think you're right i'm actually on a human level because he's been he's made the decision like he said that driver monitoring is the wrong way to go but like you have to think of as a human as a ceo i think that's the right thing to say when like sometimes you have to say things publicly they're different than when 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 yeah like our cars don't have the thing that i think is right to have uh 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 like george haas say i told you so all i will say is i am not a leader and i am happy to change my mind um and i 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 uh 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 driving 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 you're talking about and 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 uh 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 driving 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 like you need to have drive and 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 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 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 uh but even true with com 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 starter date started it three years ago i believe that we have the best driver monitoring solution in the world um i think that when you compare it to well supercruise is the only other one that i really know that shipped and ours is better what uh what do you like and not like about super coos um i mean i had a few super crews uh the sun would be shining through the window would blind the camera and it would say i wasn't paying attention when i was looking completely straight i couldn't reset the attention with a steering wheel touch and supercrews would disengage like i was communicating to the car i'm like look i'm here i'm paying attention why are you really gonna force me to disengage and it did um so it's it's a constant conversation with the user and yeah there's no way to ship a system like this if you can ota right we're shipping a new one every month sometimes we we balance it with our users on discord like when sometimes we make the driver monitoring a little more aggressive and people complain sometimes they don't you know we want it to be as aggressive as possible where people don't complain 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 uh 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 i mean yeah was that not obvious from the iphone the iphone was the first real product that ota'ed i think was it actually that's that's brilliant you're right i mean the game consoles used to not right the game consoles are maybe the second thing that did well 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 i love my ios 14. uh one thing that i probably disagree with you on on driving monitoring is you've said that it's easy like i mean you you tend to say stuff is easy the uh i guess you said it's easy relative to the external perception problem 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 is your intuition um yes and there's another big difference as well um 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 is paying attention it only works 92 of the time you're still getting almost all the benefit of that because the human like you're training the human yeah right you're you're dealing with a system that's really helping you out it's a conversation it's not like the external thing where guess what if you swerve into a tree you swerve into a tree right like you get no margin for error yeah i think that's really well put i i i think that's the right exactly the place where um where comparing to the external perception the control problem driver monitoring is easier because you know 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 you 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 um 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 my eye or just any kind of system like a tesla or any of the autonomous vehicle companies is because software's and there's much more sensors and so much is running on software and you're doing machine learning anyway there's an opportunity to create totally new experiences that we're not even anticipating you don't think so no you think it's a box that gets you from a to b and you want to do it chill yeah i mean i think 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 audio books so level three is where you can kind of disengage in in stretches of time [Music] [Applause] well you think level three is possible like on the highway going for 100 miles and you can just go to sleep oh yeah uh 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 thing that 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 exactly that's really important to understand one other thing you mentioned comparing comma and autopilot is that um something about the haptic feel of the way combo 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 i actually mentioned that to elon i think and then the first time we talked he wasn't biting is like communicating uncertainty i guess comet 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 um the path and yeah we want to be better about this we're actually hiring i 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're we have a great designer now but you know we need people who are just gonna like build this and debug these uis qt people and okay is that what the ui has done with this key we're moving the new ui is in qt c plus plus qt uses it yeah we had some react stuff in there react js would just react react is his own language right react native reaction react to the javascript framework yeah it's all it's all based on javascript but it's you know i like c plus plus what do you think about uh dojo with tesla and their foray into what appears to be specialized hardware for uh training neonets i guess it's something maybe you can correct me from my shallow looking at it it seems like something like google did with tpus but specialized for uh driving data i don't think it's specialized for driving data it's just legit just tpu they want to inter 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 um you basically have two options right now to 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 uh 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 without google's prior written permission well okay i mean google is not a platform company uh i wouldn't i wouldn't touch tpus with a 10-foot pole so that leaves you with the monopoly uh nvidia and video so i mean that you're not a fan of well look i was a huge fan of in 2016 nvidia jensen came sat in the car um cool guy when the stock was 30 a share uh 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 ten thousand dollars for a100s because we know we got the best  in the game and let's charge ten thousand dollars for an a100 when it's really not that different from 3080 which is 699. um 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 taken video down yeah where they could dominate it nvidia could be the new intel yeah to be in inside everything essentially and and yet the winners in 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 and then i think a lot of those things are going to fall through if i were nvidia 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 that's 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 the interesting thing about jensen is he is a big vision guy so he has a plan like for 50 years down the road so it makes me wonder like 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 me to pass right and so the 1080 ti was a great gpu still have a lot of them it was 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 um what tesla is doing with autopilot and dojo is the apple way is because they're not going to share dojo with uh george hotz uh i i know they should sell that chip oh they should sell their even their their accelerator the accelerator that's in all the cars the 30 watt one sell it why not so open it up make 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 uh perhaps asking is uh do you want tesla stuff inside other vehicles in inside potentially inside like uh 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 yeah ssr's we make batteries but the thing about the tesla tpu um is anybody can build that it's just a question of you know are you willing to spend the you know the money it could be a huge source of revenue potentially are you willing to spend 100 million dollars right 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 knock off and video chips and that's from your perspective i don't know if you're also paying attention to stan tesla for a moment all dave elon musk has talked about a complete rewrite of uh 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 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 uh you know easier like you can annotate the world in one place and then kind of distribute itself across the sensors and across a different like the hundreds of tasks that are involved in the hydronet what are your thoughts about this rewrite is it just like some details that are kind of obvious there are steps that should be taken or is there something fundamental that could challenge your idea that end to end is the right solution uh we're in the middle of a bakery right now as well we haven't shipped a new model in a bit of what kind uh 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 uh because we're assuming the flat ro flat world hypothesis uh the new models do not do this the new models output everything in 3d um so this but there's still no annotation so the 3d is it's more about the opposite yeah uh we have we have disease and everything uh we've disease yeah we had a disease we had a disease um we unified a lot of stuff as well uh we switched from tensorflow to pi torch yes uh my understanding of what tesla's thing is is that their annotator now annotates across the time dimension uh i mean cute why are you building an annotator i 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 you're basically the 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 common ai model and you're able to mine that data based on the kind of edge cases you need i 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 like us humans are able to do this kind of mining a little better but but yeah there's obvious as we as we know there's obvious constraints and limitations to that idea uh carpathi just tweeted he's like um you get really interesting insights if you saw if you sort your validation set by loss and look at the highest loss examples yeah uh so yeah i mean you can do we we have we have a little data engine like thing we're training a segment uh it's not fancy it's just like okay train the new segment run it on 100 000 images and now take the thousand with highest loss select 100 of those by human put those get those ones labeled retrain do it again right so it's a much less well-written data engine and yeah you can 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 um but for driving itself you have it all annotated beautifully by what the human does so 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 the 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 and i mean it's obvious that over eventually you have to do end to end with some calibration with some fixes and so on but it's uh 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 um you have to supervise that with humans whether a human is paying attention or not is a completely subjective judgment um like you can try to like 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 you know other humans labeling it really well i don't know uh you you so if you think deeply about it you could you might be able to just depending on the task maybe you'll 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's doing this too right is there they're doing annotation based on it's like uh self-supervised learning too it's just a small part of the entire picture it's 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 i have a problem you know once we have skill to full once we have two people once we have two three people on that team i definitely want to look at self-annotating stuff or yeah for attention let's go back for a sec to uh 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 uh i think it's 91 cars 91 makes models um we get to 100 this year nice the yeah the 2020 corolla great choice the um 2020 sonata uh 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 um 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 uh 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 comma does not officially endorse that um but we have been doing it we didn't ever release it uh 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 as opposed to so depending on the level of experimentation you're willing to to do that's the community if you if you just want to buy it and you have a supported car yeah 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 uh so what if i wanted to this is something i asked you offline or like a few months ago if i wanted to run my own code to um so use comma as a platform and try to run something like open pilot what does it take to do that um 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 um there's a whole lot of people so about 60 of people are running stock comma about 40 percent 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 uh 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 it's your i'm not here to tell you you know uh 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 you got it so you encourage responsible uh forking yeah yeah some people you know yeah some people uh like like there's forks that will do um some people just like having a lot of uh readouts on the ui like a lot of like flashing numbers so there's forks that do that uh 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 um some cars we use the stock longitudinal control we don't do the longitudinal control on all the cars uh some cars the acc's are pretty good in the cars it's the lane keep that's atrocious in anything except for autopilot 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 supercruise and 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 and like what's going on here um 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 break or cancel let's talk about money what's uh the business strategy for comma profitable well it's you're good so congratulations yeah uh what uh so basically selling so we should say combo cost uh a thousand bucks comment 200 for the interface to the car as well it's 1200 all said done nobody's usually up front like this yeah you got it you got to have the tac on right yeah i love it this side i'm not going to lie to you trust me it will add 1200 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 it could cost a lot more than twelve hundred dollars so comma three is in the works so it could be all i will say is future hardware is going to cost a lot more than the current hardware yeah like i mean the people that use uh 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 this is a good sign yeah it's a really good sign um 70 of comma 2 buyers are daily active users yeah it's amazing um oh also we don't plan on stopping selling the comma too like like it's you know so whatever you create that's beyond comma two it would be uh it would be potentially a phase shift like it's you it's so much better that like you could use comma two and you can use comma depends what you want it's three point four one kind of 42 yeah you know autopilot hardware one versus hardware two yeah the comma 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 the vr headsets that the average is just once yeah which is 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 comm is like they can't believe they're getting this for a thousand bucks right it's it seems it seems like a some kind of steal so but in terms of like long-term business strategies it basically to put so it's currently in like a thousand plus cars 1200 more uh so yeah dailies is about uh dailies is about 2 000 weekly is about 2 500. monthlies is over 3 000. wow we've grown a lot since we've stopped 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 yeah that's exactly it right so yeah they did it i actually don't know the timeline of that one they but let let's talk uh 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 into 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 in users just like android crossed over ios how does google make money from android uh it's it's complicated their own devices make money google google makes money by just kind of having you on the internet uh yes 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 not is a brilliant thing i mean android arguably changed the world so there you go that's you can you can feel good ethically speaking but as a business strategy it's questionable i'll sell hardware so 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 percent 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 well i'll compete well i'll compete 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 it's uh confidence in 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 three thousand company's um i'm 2500 right now uh and like okay we're probably going to sell 10 000 units next year right 10 000 units even just a thousand dollars a unit okay we're 10 million in uh in in in in revenue um get that up to a hundred thousand maybe double the price of the unit now we're talking like 200 million in revenue yeah actually making money uh one of the rare semi-autonomous or autonomous vehicle companies that are actually making money yeah 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 you're a b testing your model and if you're you're 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's eventually going to surpass you guys no they're not 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 uh i do not think we're gonna surpass tesla ever in terms of revenue i think tesla can capture a lot more revenue per user than we can um 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 comma hardware um and then as far as a tesla owner being able to switch to open pilot uh 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 uh a large company like automakers 4g m toyota came to george hotz or on the tech space amazon facebook google came with a large pile of cash would would you consider being purchased do you see that as a one possible not seriously now um i would probably uh see how much uh they'll entertain for me um and if they're willing to like jump through a bunch of my hoops then maybe but like no not the way that m a works today i mean we've been approached and i laugh in these people's faces i'm like are you kidding me yeah you know because you're so it's so it's so demeaning the m 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 i don't what am i gonna do with more fedcoin you know i had coin fat coin man i love that so that's the cool thing about podcasting actually is uh people criticize i don't know if you're familiar with the spotify uh giving joe rogan a hundred million and something about that and you know they respect despite all the 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 um you know could i respect gm never um no i couldn't i mean could i respect like a hyundai more so right that's that's a lot closer toyota what's your nah nah it's korean is the way i think i think that you know the japanese the germans the us they're all too they're all too you know they all think they're too 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 subscribe it would be ironic oh if uh if common ai is acquired by apple i mean facebook look i quit facebook 10 years ago because i didn't respect the business model um google has declined so fast in the last five years what are your thoughts about waymo as present and future so let me let me see let me start by saying something uh nice which is uh i've visited them a few times and i've [Music] 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 the speed limit it goes and it works really damn well and the interface is nice and chandler arizona yeah yeah yeah in challengers in a very specific environment so it i you know it gives me enough material in my mind to push back against the madman of the world like george hotz to be like like because you kind of imply there's zero probability they're going to win yeah and 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 uh no i think that the product that they're building doesn't make sense um so a few things uh you say the weimos are fast um benchmark away mo against a competent uber driver right 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 non-stop i like when my uber driver doesn't come to a full stop at the stop sign yeah you know and so let's say the waymo's are 20 slower than than an uber right um you can argue they're going to be cheaper and i argue that users already have the choice to trade off money for speed it's called uberpool um i think it's like 15 of rides or uber pools right 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 right um like 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 a 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 4 autonomous cars are viable if you uh let's play a fun experiment if you ran let's do a tesla and let's do waymo if uh elon musk took a vacation for a year he just said screw it i'm gonna go live on an island no electronics and the board decides that we need to find somebody to run the company and they 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 segnets like that's just software who cares right like it's not gonna it's not like you're doing something terrible with segnats 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 uh 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 um 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 he would also have to take over his twitter so god i don't tweet yeah what's your twitter situation why why why are you so quiet on twitter comma is like what what's your social network presence like because you you on instagram you're you're you uh you do live streams you're you're you're um you understand the music of the internet but you don't always fully engage into it you're part-time i used to have a twitter yeah i mean it's the pr instagram is a pretty place instagram is a beautiful place it glorifies beauty i like i like instagram's values as a network um twitter glorifies conflict glorifies you know like like like like like you know just shots taking shots at people and it's like you know well you know twitter and donald trump are perfectly they're perfect for each other so tesla's on uh 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 way more 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 uh what would you call that approach like it's not necessarily lighter based because it's not about lighter but before robot taxi level four robot taxi all in before any before making your revenue uh 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 uh i would go i would get anthony levandowski out of jail and i would put him in charge of the company um let's try to break that apart why 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 uh you like renegade style thinking that uh pushes that that like throws away bureaucracy and goes to first principle thinking what what do you mean by that um 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 what um 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 yeah there's big risks yeah what do you make of him i was i was going to talk to him in 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 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 and it's difficult to oh oh 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 dollars in the hull right whatever idea waymo does look com is profitable comes raised 8.1 million dollars 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 weight most 10 billion so i i think the basic idea with women well forget the 10 billion because they have some backing but your basic thing is like what can we do to stop 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 call myself a transitionary ceo do everything i can to fix that situation yeah uh yeah cause i can't i can't do it right like i can't i can't oh i mean i can talk about how what i really want to do is just apologize for all those corny uh you know ad campaigns and be like here's the real state of the technology yeah um like i 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 just can be impressive as opposed to doing these weird commercials of like your friendly yeah your friendly car company i mean that's my biggest my biggest snipe at waymo was 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 uh the rocket launchers 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'll be honest with me i want you to succeed yeah uh yeah and that requires the uh the renegade ceo right i'm with you i'm with you i still have a little bit of faith in waymo to for for the renegade ceo to step forward but it's not it's not john krafter yeah it's uh you can't it's not chris holmstone 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 i i just i if you are pre-revenue and you've raised 10 billion dollars 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 what'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 uh 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 it's i think it's the coolest applied ai problem i like it because it has a clear path to monetary value um but as far as that being the thing that changes the world i mean no like like there's cute things we're doing in common like who thought you could stick a phone on the windshield middle drive um 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 in that front could people imagine the internet 50 years ago only true junior genius visionaries yeah everyone could have imagined autonomous cars 50 years ago it's like a core 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 i've been thinking of launching a startup i see autonomous vehicles as a potential trajectory to that that i'm that's not where the direction i would like to go but i also see tesla or even kamehameha like pivoting into into robotics broadly defined that's at some stage in the way like you're mentioning the internet didn't expect let's solve you know 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 don't don't don't you're not too big to fail for however much i think kama's winning like no no no you're winning when you solve level five self-driving cars and until then you haven't win and one and you know 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 right stay mission focused brilliantly put uh like i mentioned thinking of launching a startup i've been considering actually before cove i've been thinking of moving to san francisco oh oh i wouldn't go there so why is uh okay well and now i'm thinking about potentially austin um and we're in san diego now san diego come here so why what um i mean you're such an interesting human you've launched so many successful things what uh why san diego what do you recommend why not san francisco have you thought so for 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 i mean qualcomm was an afterthought qualcomm was it was a nice thing to think about it's like you can have a tech company here and a good one i mean you know i like qualcomm but no um what's the west san diego better than stephanie 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 um san francisco so i think first year cities in general have stopped wanting growth uh well you have like in san francisco you know the voting class always votes to not build more houses because they own all the houses and they're like well you know once people have figured out how to vote themselves more money they're going to do it it is so insanely corrupt um it is not balanced at all like political party-wise you know it's it's a one-party city and for all the discussion of diversity it's has it's stops lacking real diversity of thought of background of uh approaches to strategies of yeah ideas it's 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 that's what they say right it's the projection projection yeah yeah it's interesting and even people in silicon valley tell me that's uh like high up people but everybody is like this is a terrible place it doesn't make i mean and coronavirus is really what killed it yeah san francisco was the number one uh 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 yeah i like austrians and austin's an interesting choice i wouldn't i wouldn't i don't have really anything bad to say about austin either except for the extreme heat in the summer um 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 uh yeah i mean you have these states that are you know like just way better run um california is you know it's especially san francisco so it's high horse and like yeah can i ask you 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 you know uh this is like another book of years that i'll buy for 67 i suppose uh so there's um one of these days will sell out yeah that's right jail breaks are going to be a dollar and books are going to be 67. how i uh how i joe broke the iphone by george cotts that's right how i jailbroke the iphone and you can do it that's right that's right oh god okay i can't wait but quite so you haven't introspected you have built a very unique company i mean not not you but you and others but i don't know um 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 there's no advice you can give oh i mean more beer more beer yeah i think it's all very like situation dependent um 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 it'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 um like sm 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 you want a new product yeah 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 g for you yeah that's great if you look at 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 uh essentially lying to raise money like fake it till you make it kind of thing i mean this is billy mcfarland the fire festival like we all we all experienced uh 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 i use like the anti-hype you know that's that's a slava kpss reference but um hype isn't necessarily bad i loved camping out for the iphones um 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 this 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 do that i think that's a programmer thing yeah 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 gonna deliver on it 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 beat us i still think even with their even with their missteps they have advantages we don't have um you know illness is better than me at 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 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 he does as far as i can tell he does and i i detected that in myself too like if i it's only  if you're like conscious of yourself lying yeah i think so yeah you know 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 started cult and everybody uh 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 the 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 world is uh 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 yeah 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 why why 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 yeah or like the other president or they want barack obama to fail it's like we're almost involved 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 like it seems like the efficient thing to do in this objective function that like we're all striving for is to celebrate the ones that like figure out how to like do better at that objective function as opposed to like dragging them down back into them into the mud i think there is this is the speech i always give about the commenters on hacker news um so first off something to remember about the internet in general is commenters are not representative of the population yeah i don't comment on anything i don't you know commenters are are representative of a certain sliver of the population and on hacker news a common thing i'll say is when you'll see something that's like you know promises to be wild out there and in innovative there is some amount of you know 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 and that's why they're going to fail and they have to root for them to fail to kind of maintain their world image so tune it out and they comment well it's hard i uh 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 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 that or not you don't want to be in a at a party where everyone is an yeah 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 an interesting one because they're subreddits and so you can still see especially small subreddits 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 uh that's emergent the platform's not helping that or hurting that so i guess naturally something about the internet uh 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 um i think it's yeah very doable this is uh i think actually so i i feel like twitter could be overthrown joshua bach talked about how like uh if you have like and retweet like that's only positive wiring right the only way to do anything like negative there is um with a comment and that's like that asymmetry is what gives you know twitter its particular toxicness whereas i find youtube comments to be much better because youtube comments have a have a of an up and a down and they don't show the downloads without getting into depth of this particular discussion the point is to explore possibilities and get a lot of data on it because uh i mean i could disagree with what you just said it's it's uh the point is it's unclear it's a it hasn't been explored in a really rich way like the these questions of how to create platforms that encourage positivity yeah i think it's a 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 we 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 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 uh 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 uh 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 depend on self-awareness of the users it's a it's another it's a longer discussion because uh 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 self-awareness you can reward them and incentivize and perhaps be pleasantly surprised how many people are are willing to be self-aware on the internet like we are in real life like i'm putting 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 it's very costly but on the internet it like most people are like i don't care if if this hurts somebody i don't care if this uh is not interesting or if this is yeah the mean or whatever i think so much of the engagement today on the internet is so disingenuous too yeah 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 okay okay let's talk about a fun topic which is programming here's another book idea for you let me pitch uh what's your uh perfect programming setup so like this by george hotz so uh like what listen you're giving me give me a macbook air sitting 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 uh those things are nice and i'm not going to say no to them but do they automatically unlock tons of 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 uh which operating system do you love what uh text editor do you use ide what um is there is there something that is like the perfect if you could just say the perfect productivity set up for george hawks doesn't matter it doesn't doesn't matter it really 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 uh i think that they're you can build much better tools how like ida's xrefs work way better than vx vs codes why yeah actually that's a good question like why i i still use sorry emacs eat for most uh i've actually know i have to confess something dark cause i've never used bim yeah it's i think maybe i'm just afraid that my life has been a like a waste [Laughter] i'm so i'm not i'm not evangelical about emacs i i think this this is how i feel about tender flow versus pie torch yeah having just like we've switched everything to pie torch 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 pie torch is yeah i've used emacs and them 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 i don't i don't understand it but it just connected with me maybe it's the functional language at first i connected with maybe it's because so many of the ai courses before the deep learning revolution were taught with 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 like i don't know they're not that much better i've used modernity to use them but at the same time so to just not to disagree 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 that you could you could see uh yeah so you don't have any of that you can just be in 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 uh drugs yeah and uh let's let's look at productivity like what what's the day look like on like hour by hour is there any irregularities that create a magical george hawks 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 a hundred thousand dollars if i could have one of these days tomorrow um the days have been so impactful and one was first discovering eliezer yukowski on the singularity and reading that stuff and like you know my mind was blown um the next was discovering uh the hutter price and then ai is just compression like finally understanding aix i and what all 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 one is controversial the day i found a blog called unqualified reservations and uh read that and i was like wait which one is that that's uh what's the guy's name curtis garvin yeah so many people tell me i'm supposed to talk to him yeah but 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 the 2016 election and i'm like wow okay the world makes sense now this 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 were oh interesting it's just not about but what was special about those days how did those days come to be is it just you got lucky like sure i like well you just encounter hutter prize on uh on hack news or something like that um 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 day today of like like eating breakfast and it's the mundane things nah nothing no i drift i drift through life without 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 uh 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 and i mean the ethereum thing was the highlight of it but the rest of it was pretty terrible i did a two-week road trip and i got i had to turn around i had to turn around i'm driving in uh in gunnison colorado i passed through gunnison and uh the snow starts coming down this path up there called monarch pass in order to get through to denver you gotta get over the rockies and i had to turn my car around i couldn't i watched i watched a f-150 go off the road i'm like i gotta go back and like that day was meaningful because like like it was real like i actually had to turn my car around um 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 for real okay so actually it's interesting to break apart the three moments you mentioned if it's okay so uh i always have trouble pronouncing his name but allows yakowski yeah 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 j like can you maybe uh break apart like what exactly was so magical to use a transformational experience today everyone knows him for threats and ai safety um this was pre that stuff there was i don't think a mention of ai safety on the page um 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 well sorry man is there something specific you can take from his work that you can remember yeah uh it was this realization that uh 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 actually transformed the world it opened the door to human obsolescence it opened the door to realize that in my lifetime humans are going to be replaced and then the matching idea to that of artificial intelligence with the hutter prize you know i'm torn i go back and forth on what i think about it yeah but the the the basic thesis is it's nice to com it's a nice compelling notion that we can reduce the task of creating an intelligent system a general intelligence system into the task of compression so you can think of all of intelligence in the universe in fact as a kind of compression do you find that was that just at the time you found that as a compelling idea do you still find that a compelling idea i still find that compelling idea um i think that it's not that useful day to day but actually um one of maybe my quests before that was a search for the definition of the word intelligence and i never had one and i definitely have a definition of the word compression it's a very uh simple uh straightforward one and uh you know what confession is you know what lossless is lossless compassion 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 just 10x 10xed the uh the prize for that competition like recently a few months ago you ever thought of taking a crack at that oh i did oh i did i spent i spent the next after i found the prize i spent the next six months of my life trying it and uh well that's when i started learning everything about ai and then i worked vicarious for a bit and then i learned read all the deep learning stuff and i'm like okay now i like i'm called 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 uh some of the first deep learning models i played with were uh like gpt basically but before transformers before it was still uh rnn's to to do uh character prediction but by the way on the compression side i mean the especially neural networks what do you make of the lossless requirement with the hudder prize so you know human intelligence and neural networks can probably compress stuff pretty well but it would be lossy it's imperfect uh 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 over the next character you can then use an arithmetic encoder to uh right you don't have to know 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 could 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 uh 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 gpg 12 and get general-purpose intelligence like your loss function is literally 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 advocate on yourself is it possible that you can the gpt-12 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 and that's that they don't have a uh they don't have long-term memory right right so like just gpt 12 a scaled up version of gpt two or three i find it hard to believe well you can scale it in it's yeah so it's a hardcore hard-coded length but you can make it wider and wider and wider yeah you're gonna get you're gonna get cool things from those systems but i i don't think you're ever gonna get something that can like you know build me a rocket ship what about solve driving so you know you can use transformer with video for example you think is there something in there no because hey look we use we as a group we use a group we could change that group out to a transformer um i think driving is much more markovian than language so markov you mean like the memory which which aspect of uh i mean that like most of the information in the state at t minus one is also in the in is in state t yeah right and it kind of like drops off nicely like this where sometime with language you have to refer back to the third paragraph on the second page i feel like there's not many like like you can say like speed limit signs but there's really not many things in autonomous driving that look like that but if you look at uh to play devil's advocate is uh the risk estimation thing that you've talked about it's kind of interesting is uh it feels like there might be some longer term uh aggregation of context necessary to be able to figure out like the context yeah i'm not even sure i'm i'm believing my my own devil's we have a nice we have a nice like vision model which outputs like a a one two four dimensional perception space um can i try transformers on it sure i probably will at some point we'll try transformers and then we'll just see do they do better sure i'm well it might not be a game changer no well i'm not like like might transformers work better than grooves for autonomous driving sure might we switch sure is this some radical change no okay we use a slightly different you know we switch from rnns to grooves like okay maybe it's greased to transformers but no it's not yeah i well on the on the topic of general intelligence i don't know how much i've talked to you about it like what um do you think will actually build an agi like if if you look at ray kurzweil with a singularity do you have like an intuition about you're kind of saying driving is easy yeah and i i tend to personally believe that solving driving will have really deep important impacts on our ability to solve general intelligence like i i think driving doesn't require general intelligence but i think they're going to be neighbors in a way that it's like deeply tied because it's so like driving is so deeply connected to the human experience that i think solving one will help solve the other but but so i don't see i don't see driving is like easy and almost like separate than general intelligence but like what's your vision of a future with a singular do you see there'll be a single moment like a singularity where it'll be a phase shift are we in the singularity now like what do you have crazy ideas about the future in terms of agi we're definitely in the singularity now um we are coolers of course look at the bandwidth between people the bandwidth between people goes up all right um the singularity is just you know when the bandwidth but what do you mean by the bandwidth of the people communications tools the whole world is networked the whole world is networked and we raise the speed of that network right oh so you think the communication of information in a distributed way is a empowering thing for collective intelligence oh i didn't say it's necessarily a good thing but i think that's like when i think of the definition of the singularity yeah it seems kind of right i see like it's a change in the world beyond which like the world be transformed in ways that we can't possibly imagine no i mean i think we're in the singularity now in the sense that there's like you know one world and a monoculture and it's also linked yeah i mean i i kind of shared the intuition that the the singularity will originate from the collective intelligence of us ants versus the like some single system agi type thing oh i totally agree with that yeah i don't i don't really believe in like like a hard take off agi kind of thing um yeah i don't think i don't even think ai is all that different in kind from what we've already been building um with respect to driving i think driving is a subset of general intelligence and i think it's a pretty complete subset i think the tools we develop at comma will also be extremely helpful to solving general intelligence and that's i think the real reason why i'm doing it i don't care about self-driving cars it's a cool problem to beat people at but yeah i mean yeah you're kind of you're of two minds so one you do have to have a mission and you want to focus and make sure you get you get there you can't forget that but at the same time there is a thread that's much bigger than uh the connects the entirety of your effort that's much bigger than just driving with ai and with general intelligence it is so easy to delude yourself into thinking you've figured something out when you haven't if we build a level 5 self-driving car we have indisputably built something yeah is it general intelligence i'm not going to debate that i will say we've built something that provides huge financial value yeah beautifully put that's the engineering credo like just just build the thing it's like that's why i'm with uh with the with elon on uh go to mars yeah that's a great one you can argue like who the hell cares about going to mars but the reality is set that as a mission get it done yeah and then you're going to crack some pro problem that you've never even expected in the process of doing that yeah yeah i mean no i think if i had a choice between humanity going to mars and solving self-driving cars i think going to mars is uh better but i don't know i'm more suited for self-driving cars i'm an information guy i'm not a modernist i'm a postmodernist post modernist all right beautifully put let me let me drag you back to programming for a sec what three maybe three to five programming languages should people learn do you think like if you look at yourself what did you get the most out of from learning uh well so everybody should learn c and assembly we'll start with those two right assembly yeah if you can't code in assembly you don't know what the computer's doing you don't understand like you don't have to be great in assembly but you have to code in it and then like you have to appreciate assembly in order to appreciate all the great things c gets you and then you have to code and see in order to appreciate all the great things python gets you so i'll just say assembly c and python we'll start with those three the memory allocation of of c and the the the fact that so assemblies give you a sense of just how many levels of abstraction you get to work on in modern day programs yeah yeah graph coloring for assignment register assignment and compilers yeah like you know you got to do you know the compiler your computer only has a certain number of registers you can have all the variables you want a c function you know so you get to start your build intuition about compilation like what a compiler gets you what else um well then there's then there's kind of uh so those are all very imperative programming languages um then there's two other paradigms for programming that everybody should be familiar with i'm one of them is functional uh you should learn haskell and take that all the way through learn a language with dependent types like learn that whole space like the very pl theory heavy languages and haskell is your favorite functional what is that the go-to you would say yeah i'm not a great haskell programmer i wrote a compiler in haskell once there's another paradigm and actually there's one more paradigm that i'll even talk about after that that i never used to talk about when i would think about this but the next paradigm is learn verilog of hdl um understand this idea of all of the instructions execute at once if i have a block in verilog and i write stuff in it it's not sequential they all execute it once and then like think like that that's how hardware works to be so i guess assembly doesn't quite get you that assembly's more about compilation and verilog is more about the hardware like giving a sense of what actually is the hardware is doing assembly c python are straight like they sit right on top of each other in fact c is well let's see it's kind of coded in c but you could imagine the first c was coded in assembly and python is actually coded in c um so you know you can straight up go on that got it and then verilog gives you that's brilliant okay and then i think there's another one now everyone should carpathi calls it programming 2.0 which is learn a i'm not even gonna don't learn tensorflow learn pi torch so machine learning we've got to come up with a better term than programming 2.0 or um but yeah it's a programming language i wonder if it could be formalized a little bit better which we feels like we're in the early days of what that actually entails data-driven programming data-driven programming yeah but it's so fundamentally different as a paradigm than the others uh like it almost requires a different skill set but you think it's still yeah and ply torch versus tensorflow pytorch wins it's the fourth paradigm it's the fourth paradigm that i've kind of seen there's like this you know imperative functional hardware i don't know a better word for it and then ml do you have advice for people uh that want to you know get into programming want to learn programming you have a a video uh what is programming new blessings exclamation point and i think the top comment is like warning this is not for noobs uh do you have a noob like uh tldw for that video but also uh a new but friendly advice on how to get into programming you are never going to learn programming by watching a video called learn programming the only way to learn programming i think and the only one is the only way everyone i've ever met who can program well learned it all in the same way they had something they wanted to do and then they tried to do it and then they were like oh well okay this is kind of you know be nice if the computer could kind of do this thing and then you know that's how you learn you just keep pushing on a project um so the only advice i have for learning programming is go program somebody wrote to me a question like we don't really they're looking to learn about recurring neural networks he's saying like my company is thinking of doing recruit using recurring neural networks for time series data but we don't really have an idea of where to use it yet we just want to like do you have any advice on how to learn about these are these kind of general machine learning questions and i think the answer is like actually have a problem that you're trying to solve and and just i see that stuff oh my god when people talk like that they're like i heard machine learning's important could you help us integrate machine learning with macaroni and cheese production you just i don't even you can't help these people like who lets you run anything who lets that kind of person run anything i think we're we're all um we're all beginners at some point so it's not like they're a beginner it's it's like my problem is not that they don't know about machine learning my problem is that they think that machine learning has something to say about macaroni and cheese production or like i heard about this new technology how can i use it for why like i don't know what it is but how can i use it for why that's true you have to build up an intuition of how because you might be able to figure out a way but like the prerequisites you should have a macaroni and cheese problem to solve first exactly and then two you should have more traditional like in the learning process should involve more traditionally applicable problems in the space of whatever that is of machine learning and then see if it could be applied to background at least start with tell me about a problem like if you have a problem you're like you know some of my boxes aren't getting enough macaroni in them um can we use machine learning to solve this problem that's much much better than how do i apply machine learning to macaroni and cheese one big thing maybe this is me uh talking to the audience a little bit because i get these days so many messages a device on how to like learn stuff okay my this this this is not me being mean i think this is quite a profound actually is you should google it oh yeah like one of the uh like skills that you should really acquire as an engineer as a researcher as a thinker like one there's two two complementary skills like one is with a blank sheet of paper with no internet to think deeply and then the other is to google the crap out of the questions you have like that's actually a skill i don't people often talk about but like doing research like pulling at the thread like looking up different words going into like github repositories with two stars and like looking how they did stuff like looking at the code or going on twitter seeing like there's little pockets of brilliant people that are like having discussions like if you're a neuroscientist go into signal processing community if you're an ai person going into the psychology community like like switch communities that keep searching searching searching because it's so much better to invest in like finding somebody else who already solved your problem than than this to try to solve the problem and because they've often invested years of their life like entire communities are probably already out there who have tried to solve your problem i think they're the same thing i think you go try to solve the problem and then in trying to solve the problem if you're good at solving problems you'll stumble upon the person who solved it already yeah but the stumbling is really important i think that's a skill that people should really approach especially in undergrad like search if you ask me a question how should i get started in deep learning like especially like that is just so google like the whole point is you google that and you get a million pages and just start looking at them yeah start pulling at the thread start exploring start taking notes start getting it advice from a million people that already like spent their life answering that question actually oh well yeah i mean that's definitely also yeah when people like ask me things like that i'm like trust me the top answer on google is much much better than anything i'm going to tell you right yeah people ask it's an interesting question let me know if you have any recommendations what three books technical or fiction or philosophical had an impact on your life or you would recommend perhaps uh maybe we'll start with the least controversial uh infinite jest um infinite jest is a david foster wallace yeah it's a book about wireheading really very enjoyable to read very uh well-written you know you will you will you will grow as a person reading this book uh it's effort um and i'll set that up for the second book which is pornography it's called atlas shrugged um uh which um atlas drug is pornography i mean it is i will not i will not defend the i will not say atlas shrugged is a well-written book it is entertaining to read certainly just like pornography the production value isn't great um you know there's a 60-page monologue in there that ann rand's editor really wanted to take out and she uh paid she paid out of her pocket to keep that 60 page monologue in the book um but it is a great book for a kind of framework um of human relations and i know a lot of people are like yeah but it's a terrible framework yeah but it's a framework just for context in a couple days i'm speaking with for uh probably four plus hours with euron brook who's the main living remaining objectivists objectivist interesting uh so i've always found this philosophy quite interesting on many levels one of how repulsive some percent of large percent of the population find it which is always uh always funny to me when people are like unable to even read a philosophy because uh of some i think that says more about their psychological perspective on it yeah but but there is something about objectivism and iran's philosophy that's very deeply connected to this idea of capitalism of uh the ethical life is the productive life um that was always um compelling to me it didn't seem as like i didn't seem to interpret it in the negative sense that some people do to be fair i read that book when i was 19. so you had an impact at that point yeah yeah and the the bad guys in the book have this slogan from each according to their ability to each according to their need and i'm looking at this and i'm like these are the most cards this is team rocket level cartoonishness right no bad guy and then when i realized that was actually the slogan of the communist party i'm like wait a second wait no no no no no just you're telling me this really happened yeah it's interesting i mean one of the criticisms of her work is she has a cartoonish view of good and evil like that there's like the the reality isn't jordan peterson says this is that each of us have the capacity for good and evil in us as opposed to like there's some characters who are purely evil and some characters are purely good and that's in a way why it's pornographic the production value i love it well evil is punished and there's very clearly you know there's no there's no you know uh just like porn doesn't have uh you know like character growth well you know neither does alex shrugged like brilliant well put but as a 19 year old george cotts it was it was good enough yeah yeah what uh what's the third you have something um i i could give these these two i'll just throw out uh there's sci-fi uh permutation city um great things to start thinking about copies of yourself and then um that is uh greg egan uh he's uh that might not be his real name some australian guy might not be australian i don't know um and then this one's online it's called the metamorphosis of prime intellect um it's a story set in a post-singularity world it's interesting is there uh can you if either of the worlds do you find something uh philosophy interesting in them that you can comment on i mean it is clear to me that uh metamorphosis prime intellect is like written by an engineer uh which is it's very it's very almost a pragmatic take on a utopia in a way positive or negative well that's up to you to decide reading the book and the ending of it is very interesting as well and i didn't realize what it was i first read that when i was 15. i've reread that book several times in my life and it's sure it's 50 pages everyone should go read it what's uh sorry this is a little tangent i've been working through the foundation i've been i've haven't read much sci-fi my whole life and i'm trying to fix that the last few months that's been a little side project what's uh to use the greatest sci-fi novel uh that uh people should read or is that or i mean i would yeah i would i would say like yeah permutation city metamorphosis environmental i got it um i don't know i i didn't like foundation uh i thought it was way too modernist i feel like dune i've never read dune i've never read dune i have to read it uh fire upon the deep is interesting uh okay i mean look everyone should read everyone's reading romance everyone should read snow crash if you haven't read those like start there um yeah i haven't read snow questions yeah no it means very entertaining go to lecture bach and if you want the controversial one bronze age mindset all right i'll look into that one those aren't sci-fi but just to round out books so a bunch of people asked me on twitter and read it and so on for advice so what advice would you give a young person today about life another way what uh yeah i mean looking back especially when you're young younger you did and you continued it you've accomplished a lot of interesting things is there some advice from those i'm that life of yours that you can pass on if college ever opens again i would love to give a graduation speech um at that point i will put a lot of somewhat satirical effort into this question yeah at this you haven't written anything at this point oh you know what always wear sunscreen this is water like you're plagiarizing i mean you know but that's the that's the like clean your room you know yeah you can play drugs from from all this stuff and it's it's there is no self-help books aren't designed to help you they're designed to make you feel good like whatever advice i could give you already know everyone already knows sorry it doesn't feel good right like you know you know what what if if i tell you that you should you know eat well and and and read more and it's not gonna do anything i think the whole like genre of those kind of questions is is is meaningless i don't know if anything it's don't worry so much about that stuff don't be so caught up in your head right i mean you're yeah in the sense that your whole life is your whole existence is like moving version of that advice i don't know yeah there's there's something i mean there's something in you that resists that kind of thinking and that in itself is it's just illustrative of uh who you are and there's something to learn from that i think you're you're clearly not overthinking stuff yeah and you know it's a gut thing i even when i talk about my advice i'm like my advice is only relevant to me it's not relevant to anybody else i'm not saying you should go out if you're the kind of person who overthinks things to stop overthinking things it's not bad it doesn't work for me maybe it works for you i you know i don't know let me ask you about love yeah uh so i think last time we talked about the meaning of life and it was it was kind of about winning of course uh i don't think i've talked to you about love much whether romantic or just love for the common humanity amongst us all what role has love played in your life in this in this quest for winning where does love fit in well the word love i think means uh several different things there's uh love in the sense of maybe i could just say there's like love in the sense of opiates and love in the sense of uh oxytocin and then love in the sense of maybe like a love for math i don't think fits into either those first two paradigms uh so each of those have they uh have they have they given something to you in your life i'm not that big of a fan of the first two um what the same reason i'm not a fan of you know the same reason i don't do opiates and don't take ecstasy right and there were times look i've tried both um i like opiates way more than i liked ecstasy uh but they're not the ethical life is the productive life so maybe that's my problem with with those and then like yeah a sense of i don't know like abstract love for humanity i mean the abstract love for humanity i'm like yeah i've always felt that and i guess it's hard for me to imagine not feeling it and maybe there's people who don't and i don't know but yeah that's just like a background thing that's there i mean since we brought up uh drugs let me ask you this is becoming more and more part of my life because i'm talking a few researchers that are working on psychedelics i've eaten shrooms a couple times and it was fascinating to me that like the mind can go like it's fascinating the mine can go to places i didn't imagine it could go and it was very friendly and and positive and exciting and everything was kind of hilarious in the in the place wherever my mind went that's where i went is uh what do you think about psychedelics do you think they have where do you think the mind goes have you done psychedelics where do you think the mind goes uh is there something useful to learn about the places it goes once you come back you know i find it interesting that this idea that psychedelics have something to teach is almost unique to psychedelics right people don't argue this about amphetamines and that's true and i'm not really sure why yeah i think all of the drugs have lessons to teach i think there's things to learn from opiates i think there's things to learn from amphetamines i think there's things to learn from psychedelics things to learn from marijuana um but also at the same time recognize that i don't think you're learning things about the world i think you're learning things about yourself yes um and you know what's the even though it might have even been uh might have been a timothy leary quote i don't want to miss about him but the idea is basically like you know everybody should look behind the door but then once you've seen behind the door you don't need to keep going back um so i mean and that's my thoughts on on all real drug use too except maybe for caffeine it's a it's a little experience that uh it's good to have but oh yeah no i mean yeah i guess yeah psychedelics are definitely um so you're a fan of new experiences i suppose yes because they all contain a little especially the first few times it contains some lessons that could be picked up yeah and i'll i'll revisit psychedelics maybe once a year um usually small smaller doses maybe they turn up the learning rate of your brain i've heard that i like that yeah that's cool big learning rates have pros and cons last question this is a little weird one but you've called yourself crazy in the past uh first of all on a scale of one to ten how crazy would you say are you oh i mean it depends how you you know when you compare me to elon musk and anthony lewandowski not so crazy so like like a seven let's go with six six yes six what uh well like seven seven's a good number seven sorry well yeah i'm sure day by day changes right so but you're in that in that area what uh in thinking about that what do you think is the role of madness is that a feature or a bug if you were to uh dissect your brain so okay from like a like mental health lens on crazy i'm not sure i really believe in that i'm not sure i really believe in like a lot of that stuff right this concept of okay you know when you get over to like like like like hardcore bipolar and schizophrenia these things are clearly real somewhat biological and then over here on the spectrum you have like a dd and oppositional defiance disorder and these things that are like wait this is normal spectrum human behavior like this isn't you know where's the the line here and why is this like a problem so there's this whole this you know the neurodiversity of humanity is huge like people think i'm always on drugs people are saying this to me on my streams and like guys you know like i'm real open with my drug use i'd tell you if i was on drugs yeah i had like a cup of coffee this morning but other than that this is just me you're witnessing my brain and action so so the word madness doesn't even uh make sense and then you're in the rich neurodiversity of humans i think it makes sense but only for like some insane extremes like if you are actually like visibly hallucinating um you know that's okay but there is the kind of spectrum on which you stand out like that that's uh like if i were to look you know at decorations on a christmas tree or something like that like if you were a decoration out that would catch my eye like that thing is sparkly whatever the hell that thing is uh there's something to that just like refusing to be um boring or maybe boring is the wrong word but to um yeah i mean be willing to sparkle you know it's it's like somewhat constructed i mean i am who i choose to be uh i'm gonna say things as true as i can see them i'm not gonna i'm not gonna lie and but that's a really important feature in itself so like whatever the neurodiversity of your whatever your brain is not putting um constraints on it that force it to to fit into the mold of what society is like defines what you're supposed to be so you're one of the specimens that that doesn't mind being yourself being right is super important except at the expense of being wrong without breaking that apart i think it's a beautiful way to end it and george you're one of the most special humans i know it's truly an honor to talk to you thanks so much for doing it thank you for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with george hotz and thank you to our sponsors for sigmatic which is the maker of delicious mushroom coffee decoding digital which is a tech podcast that i listen to and enjoy and expressvpn which is the vpn i've used for many years please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars in apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from the great and powerful linus torvald talk is cheap show me the code thank you for listening and hope to see you next time