In a respectful podcast discussion, chip expert Joe Keller and MIT researcher Lex Fridman disagreed on how realistic autonomous driving will be in the coming years. Keller worked for Tesla on the specialized FSD (Full Self-Driving) chip and assumed responsibility for the entire autopilot team before retiring in April 2018. At MIT, Fridman conducts research on autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence. Tesla CEO Elon Musk was also a guest on his podcast.
Keller, who mostly left Tesla according to the blog Electrek because he wanted to concentrate entirely on hardware development instead of partly on management, was unwaveringly optimistic in the conversation. The calculations for autonomous driving are relatively simple, although one might argue that the computers have to be 2, 5, or 10 times stronger, he said. Nevertheless, autonomous driving is not extremely difficult – the big problem with driving is attention, not ability.
But the human brain can rely on its incredible visual system unlike a car computer, Fridman objected. “You can train a neural network to extract the distance of every object and the shape of every surface from a video and data,” said Keller, “it’s really not very difficult.” “But we only learned evolution in billions of years …”, Fridman wanted to counter again, but Keller ended with “… driving a car”, whereupon both burst out laughing.
“You would be surprised how easy the calculations are,” said Keller about autonomous driving. At Tesla, Elon Musk takes great care to ensure that the technology for autonomous driving remains affordable. In ten years, it will be completely normal, like GPS technology today. Fridman insisted that the problems were not at all easy to solve, but admitted that he could be pleasantly surprised.
Regarding his relationship with the Tesla boss, Keller said that he likes to think back on his time with him. He kept thinking that he had come up with the famous first principles on a problem, and then learned from Musk that he “hadn’t even scratched the surface”. In addition, Keller recalled an event at Tesla in which the simultaneous landing of two rockets from the sister company SpaceX was broadcast. When this worked, all 500 people present cheered, some of them burst into tears. “How do you do that?” Asked Keller.
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