Commas Are Very Important
We haven’t talked about autonomous cars lately and to fix that issue, this week’s article is centered around a punctuation mark.
Well, it’s really about the company that I reported about earlier - Comma.ai. As you may remember, Comma.ai’s CEO George Hotz (the guy who hacked an early iPhone), was trying to make a kit that was super cheap and allowed any car to be converted into an autonomous one.
If you didn’t hear, Comma.ai actually shut its doors when it faced regulatory pressure from the NHTSA. I was pretty depressed for the couple of months since I was really rooting for this guy since it was just him that actually made working autonomous car software in a matter of months compared to Tesla spending years developing theirs.
But, there was a Great Awakening! As the clouds parted, God could be seen on November 30 as George Hotz explained to a couple of reporters at his house what he was going to do next. George explained to them that he was going to open source his exquisite software for the masses - FOR FREE! That’s right, if you want to start making your car autonomous in your garage, have no fear! Just download the free Open Pilot or Comma Neo repositories from GitHub online!
As George was getting pats on the back from his Andreessen Horowitz investors and the industry, I thought to myself that this is really a step forward towards a safer future. George basically catalyzed new development of autonomous cars by offering his services for free. It sure beats just making one kit that allows one to convert their car when every startup can be supplied with this valuable information.
And his software doesn’t just stop at autonomous cars. The software has had huge volumes of training data (actual driving data) incorporated into its architecture which means that it’s pretty damn accurate. Sensor companies, chip companies, and pretty much any component maker that deals with autonomous cars will benefit.
Oh by the way, open source has historically lead to all around success in technological innovations. For example, consider Java, an open source programming language that costs nothing to use with plenty of databases provided by Oracle so that you can code all different types of things. It’s allowed tons of students to start coding and countless programs to be built that run our daily lives.
Hmmm....Oracle is worth $152 billion...what's going to stop Georgie from benefiting monetarily from a $42 billion market if he just gives out his software for free and some support on the side like Oracle?
Honestly, George is a serious entrepreneur that surprises me every single time he does something. If he is interested in making some money (he probably isn’t since he did afterall reject selling his software for $999 which he stated in the press release), I wouldn’t be surprised if Google picks him up. Google after all was the king of open sourcing mobile software because of Android.
