Comma.ai's George Hotz: "Computers don't get drunk"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on George Hotz, founder of Comma.ai to talk about how he plans to "win" the race to develop self-driving cars (2:45), improving autonomy (5:30), hacking the cars already on the road (7:10), developing the Android operating system of autmoobiles (9:00), why laser-based systems are "dumb" (10:35), why he doesn't plan to raise money (11:45), how self-driving will become a subscription service (13:00), trying to explain the unexplainable (15:10), Comma's army of DIY self-driving enthusiasts (18:30), why government should stay out out of the way (21:30), and creating a system based on human driving patterns (23:20).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.0	What is it all about?
0:05.0	The only thing self-driving car needs is engineers to solve these problems.
0:09.0	It doesn't need governments, except really to stay out of the way and, you know, one of the leading causes of death of your constituents will go away.
0:24.6	Hello, hello, and welcome back to Danny in the Valley. I'm back from London, and I am struggling people with jet lag.
0:30.6	But I persevere.
0:33.6	I'm doing it for you.
0:35.6	And I'm actually coming to you live from the Danny in the Valley mobile headquarters, also known as my Honda.
0:43.7	The baby seat in the back.
0:45.6	Driving across town to meet with this week's guest, George Hatz.
0:50.0	Hots is the 27-year-old founder of a company called comma.ai.
0:55.5	And Kama is a self-driving car company, but taking a very different approach.
1:01.3	They're not trying to build a car or anything like that.
1:03.9	They're coming up with a whole kind of package of hardware and software that you could plug into most modernish cars in theory and turn it into a
1:13.1	self-driving car, at least give it some autonomous capabilities.
1:17.2	It's a big problem he's bitten off, but he's got backing from Andresen Horowitz.
1:22.4	He's gotten to a bit of bother with the authorities out here, the National Highway Transportation
1:26.5	Safety Administration,
1:28.8	I think that's what it's called. Demanded a bunch of safety information last year that he would
1:34.7	not or could not provide, so he was forced to change tact, but he's still at it. And I actually
1:40.1	met Hots about six months ago when I was working on a story on self-driving cars.
1:45.6	And he is the kind of quintessential Silicon Valley guy who believes that coding can kind of
	...

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