ccorda

Kenton Varda (tech lead) has some more notes in this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1659551757796515846

I agree that payments on their own (e.g. salary, bonuses) don't seem counter to the non-profit's interest. But what if we're talking about 100B of equity -- equity that otherwise would have gone to the parent non-profit?

A few comments have noted that it's common for non-profits own for-profits (Mozilla Foundation, college endowments, etc).

What seems different here is that rather than funneling profits up to the non-profit, the intent seems to be to make payouts to fellow board members and employees:

> Only a minority of board members are allowed to hold financial stakes in the partnership at one time. Furthermore, only board members without such stakes can vote on decisions where the interests of limited partners and OpenAI Nonprofit’s mission may conflict—including any decisions about making payouts to investors and employees. [1]

IANAL, but has anyone seen this sort of arrangement before?

[1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

The original data source of all this breaks this out into "Critical Disengagements" (CDE) and Non-Critical.

  * Critical: Safety Issue (Avoid accident, taking red light, unsafe action)
  * Non-Critical: Non-Safety Issue (Wrong lane, driver courtesy, merge issue)

That both Fred from Electrek and Taylor from Snow Bull ignore this distinction shows me their intent is less than neutral.

Looking at the original data sources [1], FSD seems to be improving over time at the metric that matters most:

  * City miles per CDE have gone from ~50 to ~120. 
  * % of drives over 5 miles with no CDE have gone from 72% to 93%.

I've been pleasantly surprised that human oversight while the software improves seems to be a viable approach. FSD doesn't appear particularly close to Waymo/Cruise at the moment, but it's not as if they are crashing left and right (you'd certainly hear about it if they were).

Personally I have it, I don't find it enjoyable to use -- but I also don't feel unsafe when using it. Highway autopilot on the other hand I find immensely reliable and valuable.

[1] https://www.teslafsdtracker.com/ https://twitter.com/eliasmrtnz1

In case it goes away, or if you're international and can't see, this seems like a good usage of Community Notes for added context and is currently published:

  Regulatory Credits on account for a small percentage of Tesla Revenue.

  2020: 6.2%
  2021: 3.2%
  2022: 2.7%

  As of FY Q3 2022 Credits were only $287m against profits of $3.3b

  https://twitter.com/FonsDK/status/1591489889924976640
  TSLA Q3 2022 IR Deck: shorturl.at/mow47

From Keith Coleman today, who authored the original post announcing birdwatch [1]

> The team is on a mission that has had the support of 3 CEOs. We're cranking.

> to all team members, contributors and advisors past and present — an amazing, mission-driven set of people.

https://twitter.com/kcoleman/status/1588611638655320064

Also, Elon has endorsed it: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925

Hoping it stays, I love the bottom the bottom up nature of it.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...

Mike DelPrete has done several:

- https://www.mikedp.com/articles/2021/12/16/opendoor-vs-zillo...

- https://www.mikedp.com/articles/2021/11/3/zillow-exits-ibuyi...

The actual implementation is a little more nuanced than always roll or never roll, with seven conditions required to avoid coming to a complete stop:

  1. The functionality must be enabled within the FSD Beta Profile settings; and

  2. The vehicle must be approaching an all-way stop intersection; and

  3. The vehicle must be traveling below 5.6mph; and

  4. No relevant moving cars are detected near the intersection; and

  5. No relevant pedestrians or bicyclists are detected near the intersection; and

  6. There is sufficient visibility for the vehicle while approaching the intersection; and

  7. All roads entering the intersection have a speed limit of 30 mph or less.

  If all the above conditions are met, only then will the vehicle travel through the all-way-stop intersection at a speed from 0.1 mph up to 5.6 mph without first coming to a complete stop. If any of the above conditions are not met, the functionality will not activate and the vehicle will come to a complete stop

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2022/RCLRPT-22V037-4462.PDF

I'd recommend this article for a deeper look at how Zillow and its competitors exhibited different behavior in Phoenix as the market cooled:

https://www.mikedp.com/articles/2021/10/19/ibuying-is-hard-z...

> As the market cooled between August and September, Opendoor and Offerpad purchased fewer houses, while Zillow purchased more.

> The iBuyers also adjusted to changing market conditions by paying less for houses. The median purchase price in Phoenix peaked in August. Opendoor and Offerpad's median purchase price also peaked in August before tracking the market and declining in September. But Zillow kept paying more and more.

Tesla has also recently added wi-fi to their existing chargers, and will facilitate payment processing:

> With a growing number of Tesla cars on the road, a Wall Connector can pay for itself over time. Property managers will soon be able to set the price of charging sessions while Tesla handles payments automatically and securely – with no monthly fees. [1]

This is a model similar to what chargepoint offers, though I suspect it will have lower fees as their main goal is to sell more cars.

* [1] https://www.tesla.com/commercial-charging

* https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/02/tesla-launching-commerc...

An example of what they used the data for is this investigation into feed changes in Georgia ahead of the runoff: https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/in-georgia-...

Raw data available here: https://github.com/the-markup/citizen-browser-georgia

This was a reverse auction, where the goal was to minimze cost to government to get high speed internet in rural areas.

Starlink bid in the Above Baseline tier, meaning ≥ 100/20 Mbps (with data cap of ≥ 2 TB).

According to the FCC [1], 99.7% of locations are at that tier or higher, and 85%+ in the highest Gigabit (1000/500) tier.

So it looks like the auction funded gigabit where there was a provider bidding at that tier, and the rest went heavily to SpaceX.

One question I have is whether these gigabit deployments actually happen, or if Starlink will pick off legacy business so quickly (full launch nationwide next year) such that rural providers aren't able to take the subsidies and actually implement the new offerings.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/matthewberryfcc/status/1335978529...

Excellent summary, thanks for that.

One thing to add is that Starship should enable 400 satellites per launch:

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-president-teases-starship-s...

This is going to apply to every employee at every company, regardless of whether they have a celebrity CEO or a clickbait friendly name.

In California, EDD released guidelines today: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Califo...

"Even if your employer has complied with the state’s requirements for reopening, and any and all government safety regulations, you would have good cause to refuse to return to work if you are at greater personal risk due to higher risk factors as identified by the” California Department of Public Health. These factors include being older than 65, having a weakened immune system or having certain serious chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, lung disease or diabetes."

Last 4 quarters of free cash flow, seems quite sustainable:

  June 30, 2019 590.40M
  March 31, 2019 -944.80M
  Dec. 31, 2018 880.66M
  Sept. 30, 2018 831.52M

> The Center for Automotive Research and other firms focusing on the impact of new technology on the auto industry don't expect electric vehicles to account for more than 10% of the sales market until the late 2020s. That's when electric vehicles could start to shake things up.

Consider California [1], where it'll likely cross that in the next few years.

  2015 | 1.7%
  2016 | 1.9%
  2017 | 2.6%
  2018 | 4.7%
  2019 | 5.6%

Or Norway, where it is already at 48% [2]

Both have higher gas prices and subsidies that help with TCO comparisons. But EV costs have lots of economies of scale yet to achieve.

Hard to imagine it takes 10 more years for the rest of the country to catch up to California.

[1] California New Car Dealer Association report Q2 19 https://electrek.co/2019/08/19/tesla-sales-electric-car-mark...

[2] https://insideevs.com/news/357526/june-2019-plugin-sales-nor...

That is a demo of full self driving, which is a perpetually coming soon feature. You even need to pay for it separately.

The actual section on what autopilot can do and what it requires of the driver is pretty clear:

> Autopilot advanced safety and convenience features are designed to assist you with the most burdensome parts of driving. Autopilot introduces new features and improves existing functionality to make your Tesla safer and more capable over time.

> Your Tesla will match speed to traffic conditions, keep within a lane, automatically change lanes without requiring driver input, transition from one freeway to another, exit the freeway when your destination is near, self-park when near a parking spot and be summoned to and from your garage.

> Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.

As a Model 3 owner, it does do those things quite accurately. Certainly more so than the MobileEye based system on our Volvo, which can't lane keep and stops abruptly.

I find it convenient and more relaxing when driving, but I heed their warning (which I also agreed to when enabling autopilot in car) and pay attention, being prepared to take over at all times.

  $TSLA annual revenue (billions)
  2018: $21.46
  2017: $11.76
  2016: $7.00
  2015: $4.05
  2014: $3.20
  2013: $2.01
  2012: $0.41
  2011: $0.20
  2010: $0.12
  2009: $0.11
  2008: $0.01

  CAGR:
  2 yr: 75%
  5 yr: 60%
  10 yr: 107%

source: https://twitter.com/TeslaPodcast/status/1090719629922746374

It's interesting to overlay Tesla 2014 - 2019 with Apple 2002 - 2007. Now what Apple did from there will be tough to match (not to mention the margins): https://ark-invest.com/research/tesla-through-the-lens-of-ap...

It wasn't just Elon who turned that down, it was put to a vote and "More than 86 million shares voted against the proposal at a shareholder meeting in June, while fewer than 17 million voted in favor, Tesla said."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-musk-blackrock/blac...

Related blog post from last November: https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35

We've been doing something similar using keen.io.

Our goals were to get high volume web data (pageviews, clicks, etc.) alongside application data already saved in our Firebase DB and synced to BigQuery.

We picked Keen because it has an open source web tracking lib https://github.com/keen/keen-tracking.js/ that easily plugs into our React/Redux stack.

They also have built-in streaming to BigQuery: https://keen.io/docs/integrations/google-bigquery/

Keen pricing is about 10% of mixpanel, so for our limited needs it has been working well.

Long term if our volumes really grew the original post looks like a good option, but figured we'd pass along this lower dev approach.

Three months ago they were oversubscribed for their debt offering. It might cost a little higher rate, but if they need more money they can get it and they're not going bankrupt. The well isn't dry.

To put numbers on it, Tesla projects by end of next year to be producing 10,000 Model 3 a week at an average price of $42,500 with 25% gross margins. That is $106,250,000 per week in gross profits.

Over 50 weeks, that's 5.3B in gross profits and over 21B in revenue.

They have high SG&A relative to other automakers, but there will be plenty of cash flow to fund further ambitions and pay off the debt it took to get them there unless they're grossly overstating profitability, capacity, or demand.

I can’t recall the pod ever talking about gambling lines, or fantasy value.

Not to say listeners don’t use the info for those purposes, but it’s not a value proposition they even hint at IMO.

For context, there was a study published three weeks ago observing that opioid overdoes fatalities are down in Colorado since they legalized recreational marijuana:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/16/legal...

Redfin listing: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Sunnyvale/1129-Prunelle-Ct-94087/h...

Is there another car company that even does OTA updates yet? Let alone unlocking car features with geotargeting.

For all the talk of Tesla's lead in electric vehicles being short term, their software DNA feels like an even greater competitive advantage.

At least with respect to the west coast:

> Unlike the Atlantic Ocean, where offshore wind farms can be bolted into the seabed in relatively shallow water, the West Coast's continental shelf plunges quickly and steeply.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-offshore-wind-20160703...

Interesting research on Continental. FWIW, looks like Tesla started using Continental's radar to replace Bosch just this week: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/2266769/

I suspect that if/when LIDAR is cheap enough, Tesla will use it.

In the meantime they outfit every single car with the best hardware that is realistic from a cost standpoint today, instead of waiting til 2020.

Seems to be taking Chris Lattner's place:

https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704