OK, this is weird. Tesla on Thursday posted (and its CEO Elon Musk tweeted) a "correction" to a Bloomberg article on George Hotz's self-driving car technology, which he reportedly built by himself in a garage.
The article in question is an in-depth, fascinating look into the recent work of Hotz, best known for being the first person to jailbreak both the iPhone and the PlayStation 3. In the piece, Hotz describes how he built an entire self-driving car system in a month, with a mere 2,000 lines of code, and applied it to his Acura. He also took the article's author, Ashlee Vance, on several rides, in which the system is shown to be vastly improving over the course of several months.
While Tesla as a company is mentioned in the article several times -- Hotz reportedly has a bet with Elon Musk to prove his self-driving car tech is better than the one built by MobilEye, which supplies some of the technology for Tesla's Autopilot system -- the focus of the article is Hotz himself and his work.
Is it improbable that a single person can build a reliable self-driving car technology in such a short time-frame? Yes. But the folks at Tesla think it's so improbable, it demands an official rebuttal.
"We think it is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles," Tesla's unsigned blog post says. And in his tweet, Musk simply calls the Bloomberg article "inaccurate."
Vance article on self-driving cars was inaccurate https://t.co/AV636KAcKH— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2015
In the eyes of Tesla, building a self-driving car that drives on a familiar road is not a big deal. But getting it to work on nearly every road requires "enormous resources" and debugging over "millions of miles of widely differing roads."
"This is the true problem of autonomy: getting a machine learning system to be 99% correct is relatively easy, but getting it to be 99.9999% correct, which is where it ultimately needs to be, is vastly more difficult," the blog post says.
While it's safe to assume that the folks at Tesla know what they're talking about, it's still odd to post a correction to an article on technology they apparently had no part in building or testing. One bit in the blog post actually has to do with Tesla, however.
"We should also clarify that Tesla’s autopilot system was designed and developed in-house. Were this simply a matter of repackaging a vendor’s technology, as claimed in the article, we would not be unique in offering this groundbreaking experience in production vehicles," the post says.
Interestingly, the Bloomberg article quotes an email, allegedly sent from Musk to Hotz, in which he offers a multimillion dollar deal for the technology, as soon as Tesla "discontinues" MobilEye -- an offer Hotz flatly denied. If correct, it calls into question the intentions behind Tesla's odd rebuttal.
In the Bloomberg article, Hotz says he looks forward to "crushing" MobilEye. We agree it's an extremely tough task, but it's not impossible -- and Hotz does have a history of beating the odds.