> Is Tesla really optimizing for best performance at any cost or are they optimizing making more money and selling that to us as an improvement?
More likely they had a fixed budget and optimized with that constraint, if they made a rigorous decision at all. But this is guesswork.
I'm not speculating about how Tesla made the decision, just commenting on Karpathy's answer. His answer is correct even if it isn't true, i.e. even if it isn't what Tesla actually did.
There are plenty of well-known analogs, like the mythical man-month. We all know that throwing more x at a problem is routinely counterproductive, even without cost as a constraint.
It's like the joke about the mathematician in the hot air balloon ... His answer is correct but it's not useful. It is correct there is some optimal solution short of an infinite number of sensors/technologies and larger than no sensors. The argument that Tesla is converging on the optimal solution vs. the more or less known reality that they couldn't get the components they needed to build enough cars is weaselly. But hey, necessity is the mother of invention. Also he can't actually share anything from his work in Tesla because presumably he's under NDA but he's gotta say something.
> It seemed like all the "full cost" negatives Andrej mentioned were related to Tesla's ability to execute, and not what would actually produce better results.
This is objectively wrong, and it's the only substantive part of the discussion. The rest is fantasizing about things nobody actually knows ("It's media training!") and imputing questionable motives to someone who hasn't done anything to deserve that ("He only cares about Tesla's bottom line!").
More likely they had a fixed budget and optimized with that constraint, if they made a rigorous decision at all. But this is guesswork.
I'm not speculating about how Tesla made the decision, just commenting on Karpathy's answer. His answer is correct even if it isn't true, i.e. even if it isn't what Tesla actually did.
There are plenty of well-known analogs, like the mythical man-month. We all know that throwing more x at a problem is routinely counterproductive, even without cost as a constraint.