Andrej Karpathy appeared recently on the No Priors podcast and contrasted Tesla with Waymo.
“Tesla has a software problem and Waymo has a hardware problem…Software problems are way easier to solve.”
He says that even though Waymo appears to be ahead in self-driving right now, he actually thinks Tesla’s ahead and ten years from now we’ll recognize that in hindsight.
He’s not super-explicit about what these problems are, but it sounds as though he’s primarily thinking about Waymo’s hardware problem in terms of scaling (as opposed to hardware quality, or hardware cost, for example).
That’s an interesting way to compare the two companies. I’m not sure I buy it – the binding constraint on Waymo seems more like performance and safety and regulation, rather than hardware acquisition. But you can at least imagine how that constraint could start to bind in the future.
David Silver 