w**z
发帖数: 8232 | 1 前一阵不是这还有人说这玩意不难做？咋没见谁动手做一个？
George Hotz has been bragging for months about his plan to beat Tesla and
Google with his self-driving car technology.
Now his San Francisco startup, Comma.ai, has raised $3.1 million from
Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) and others who are betting he might be able to do
it.
George Hotz has landed $3.1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others to
help fulfill his plan to have kits by the end of the year that will convert
cars to semi-autonomous vehicles.
Chris Dixon, a partner at A16Z, disclosed in a blog on Sunday that his firm
led the funding which had been rumored since early last month.
Dixon said he was initially skeptical of Hotz' claims that he could mass
produce technology that would convert existing cars into semi-autonomous
vehicles.
"How could someone build such an advanced system all by himself?" Dixon
wrote. "After spending time with George, my skepticism turned into
enthusiasm. I tested his car, and, along with some of my colleagues and
friends with AI expertise, dug into the details of the deep learning system
he’d developed. "I came away convinced that George’s system is a textbook
example of the 'WhatsApp effect' happening to (artificial intelligence)."
By that, Dixon refers to how WhatsApp's small team was able to quickly build
a dominant communications platform before being acquired by Facebook for
what eventually turned out to be about $22 billion.
Hotz told Re/code that he will use the funding to add engineers to his staff
of four full-time employees, and to begin selling Comma's aftermarket semi-
autonomous kit for under $1,000. It should work on cars made since 2012 and
may work on older vehicles, too, Hotz said.
“The absolute minimum requirement is that the car has to have electronic
power steering and [automatic] braking,” he said. “I’m a firm believer in
disruption and working from the bottom up. So when we launch, we’re going
to say to automakers, ‘Look, if you want your car to be able to be fitted [
with the software], you have to give us access to your API.'”
Tesla, for one, has been openly skeptical about what Hotz claims Comma can
do.
After Bloomberg wrote about seeing Comma's technology work on a 2016 Acura,
Tesla founder Elon Musk and his company openly dismissed it.
"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 wrote. "It may work as a limited demo on a known stretch of
road — Tesla had such a system two years ago — but then requires enormous
resources to debug over millions of miles of widely differing roads."
Comma isn't the only Bay Area startup working on self-driving conversion
kits. General Motors last month bought Y Combinator alumnus Cruise
Automation for more than $1 billion in a deal that had some speculating that
would put the Detroit auto giant at the head of the pack in getting self-
driving cars on the road. |
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