The WhatsApp Effect vs. The Tesla Effect

Yesterday Chris Dixon announced Andreesen Horowitz’s investment in Comma.ai, the self-driving car company founded by hacker protegy George Hotz.

In the brief announcement, Dixon highlighted “The WhatsApp Effect”:

WhatsApp was able to build a global messaging system that served 900M users with just 50 engineers, compared to the thousands of engineers that were needed for prior generations of messaging systems. This “WhatsApp effect” is now happening in AI. Software tools like Theano and TensorFlow, combined with cloud data centers for training, and inexpensive GPUs for deployment, allow small teams of engineers to build state-of-the-art AI systems.

That all seems plausible, but it’s an interesting contrast to Elon Musk’s take on autonomous vehicle software:

“I expressed some skepticism here, like, look Mobileye has got hundreds of engineers and they’ve been working on this problem for quite awhile and I think they’re pretty smart guys,” Musk says. “He wanted to make a bet, and he said ‘well how much is that worth to you?’ And I said, ‘well I mean if it were true, it would be worth millions of dollars, but I don’t think it’s true.’”

Further on, Musk advises:

The path of success for Hotz — if he wants to create a competing product to Mobileye — is to build a small company, get funding, increase its size so it can conduct verification and validation testing, Musk advises.

“There’s a ton of hard work and bug fixes, and it’s kind of like painful work, and it’s not fun and after doing that for a few years, if George, is prepared to do that, I think he would have a product that would be competitive with Mobileye,” Musk says in a tone you might hear from a parent or older sibling.

Now, to be fair, Comma.ai is on said path to success — creating a small company getting funding, increasing its size.

But I get the sense that Tesla (13,000 employees) and even Mobileye (450 employees) are different from the vision Chris Dixon has for Comma.

When GM recently acquired Cruise for a cool billion, the startup had under 50 employees. So it’s certainly decidedly to build a billion dollar self-driving car company with under 100 employees.

I guess the next question is can 50 employees create a $10 billion self-driving car company.

Volvo XC90

Last night I rode in a friend’s brand-new Volvo XC90. What a great car!

I didn’t know Volvo did luxury, or that they had advanced ADAS systems in production.

In addition to the plug-in hybrid features, and the leather interior, and the moon roof, the car has some cool self-driving features.

My favorite is the lane-assist, which the car uses to automatically keep itself in a lane. It’s not 100% yet, but it worked probably 80% of the time we tried it on the highway last night.

There is also a cool Blind Spot Information System, a self-parking feature, and a fighter-pilot-esque heads-up display.

Self-Driving Bicycle

Keeping up its tradition of great April Fool’s Day pranks, Google Netherlands gently spoofs Dutch culture by hyping the Google Self-Driving Bike.

The YouTube video features the Deputy Mayor of Amsterdam boasting, “I think the self-driving bike could really give a boost to the economy because people could even work on their bicycle.”

The director of the Dutch Cyclists’ Union states, “This is the biggest invention since the invention of the bicycle itself.”

Thumbs-up 🙂

Investing in HERE

According to Reuters, most players in the self-driving car world are mulling an investment in HERE, a digital mapping company.

HERE has a colorful history, dating back to the 1980s and involving Nokia, Audio, BMW, Mercedes, and other parent companies.

The driving logic appears to be the need for high-quality maps, particularly in adverse weather conditions.

HERE is presently controlled by the big three German auto manufacturers. Reuters reports that Amazon and Microsoft )as well as potentially many other auto manufacturers and suppliers) might pile in, as well.

Tesla’s Model 3

Last night Tesla introduced its new Model 3 sedan, built for the mass-market.

The Model 3, with a base price of $35,000, is Tesla’s first offering at a price point within range of most American cars. Actually, with federal and state-level tax incentives, the out-the-door price for the car might be below the $33,500 average price of a new US car.

115,000 people have already placed $1,000 reservations for the car, securing $115 million dollars in revenue for the company.

Autopilot will come standard on the Model 3, but the big selling points seem to be the electric (gasoline-free) engine and the general appeal of Tesla.

Big questions remain, including:

  1. When will the car will actually launch?
    The target date is late 2017, but that could slip.
  2. Will Tesla be able to mass-produce mass-market cars?
    Tesla’s Fremont, California, plant has capacity for 500,000 cars per year. But Tesla only built 50,000 cars last year. Ramping up by an order of magnitude may cause problems.
  3. Will other automakers beat Tesla to market?
    The Chevy Bolt, with a similar spec sheet, is slated to launch in late 2016.
  4. Will the Model 3 be able to maintain its $35,000 price target?
    The Model S pricing jumped somewhat from where it was announced initially, and the same could happen for the Model 3.

Nonetheless, yesterday was a pretty great day for Tesla Motors.

US Transportation Infrastructure

The poor quality of roads in the United States will be a major impediment to the launch of self-driving cars, according to Reuters.

The article quotes sources from Tesla, Toyota, and Volvo bemoaning the state of US roads, and the lack of lane markers, in particular.

Volvo’s North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker’s semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

“It can’t find the lane markings!” Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. “You need to paint the bloody roads here!”

I guess the roads in Sweden are better?

Actually, the Transportation Infrastructure Rankings, published by the World Economic Forum, place the US in the 9th spot worldwide and Sweden in 25th.

Top marks go to the UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Japan.

Perhaps the best thing the US government could do to boost self-driving cars wouldn’t actually be subsidies or competitions or even regulatory streamlining. Maybe they could just repaint the roads.

Connected Sunnyvale

With surprisingly little fanfare, Sunnyvale, California, appears to be experimenting with connected cars.

According to auto connected car news, Sunnyvale and Nissan just teamed up to deploy connected infrastructure to 130 square miles of roadway.

The article uses a new-to-me term: V2X. This stands for “vehicle-to-X (communication)”. More concretely, V2I=”vehicle-to-infrastructure”, V2V=”vehicle-to-vehicle”, and so forth.

The article is jargon-laden and a little hard to follow, but it appears that Nissan, Sunnyvale, and UC-Berkeley jointly set this up last summer as a test bed for connected infrastructure.

I mentioned earlier that Nissan has been fairly quiet on the autonomous vehicle front until recently, when it made a bold claim that it will launch lots of different autonomous vehicle models by 2020. This is further evidence that they’re serious.

Google’s Self-Driving Car Garage

Atlas Obscura is one of my favorite travel websites. It’s a repository for off-the-beaten path attractions and curiosities in the world.

One of their entries is for Google’s self-driving car garage at 1608 Plymouth Street in Mountain View, California.

This appears to be a parking garage, not a mechanical garage, so there’s no opportunity to see path-breaking work up-close.

But it seems like an easy garage to swing by and peer into, maybe a little bit like the famous HP Garage in Palo Alto. It’s funny how they’re both garages, although Google is using its garage in a more traditional sense.

Hopefully I can stop by the next time I’m in the area.

Hi Peter!

Occasionally Medium sends me an email letting me know that people have followed my posts or maybe even liked them, which always feels great.

But I got a special treat a few days ago when one of the headshots that popped up in the “New Followers” email was Peter Norvig.

Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google, but to me and many other engineers he is first-and-foremost the co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. This was the seminal textbook of artificial intelligence in my undergraduate days. To judge by Amazon rankings, the book maintains that position today.

So Peter, if you’re reading this, thanks for the lessons and for your out-sized contributions to computer science.

Also, I followed you back. 🙂