Former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy has weighed in on the fundamental differences between Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system and Google’s Waymo, stating that Waymo would be unable to replicate Tesla’s recent coast-to-coast autonomous drive achievement. The comments came on December 31, just days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly criticized Karpathy’s “dated” understanding of the company’s AI capabilities.Karpathy responded to a question on X (formerly Twitter) about whether Waymo could achieve a similar 2,732-mile journey accomplished by Tesla enthusiast David Moss using FSD V14.2. “Yes exactly, that’s correct in my understanding,” Karpathy confirmed, agreeing that Waymo’s modular approach would prevent such a feat.
Tesla’s end-to-end neural network versus Waymo’s modular system
The exchange underlined the key technological divide between the two leaders on autonomous driving. Waymo grounds itself on a bedrock of high-definition maps, LiDAR sensors, 5G connectivity, and a suite of neural networks that all interoperate inside a modular system. It was precisely that architecture that demonstrated brittleness in a San Francisco power outage when traffic lights went dark and HD maps no longer captured real-world conditions, stranding Waymo vehicles.Tesla, on the other hand, is developing a single, broad neural network that translates camera input directly into driving commands, in agreement with Karpathy’s “Software 2.0” vision of training AI from billions of miles of human driving instead of hand-coding the logic for every imaginable scenario.
Karpathy praises coast-to-coast milestone despite Musk ‘s criticism
Karpathy celebrated the autonomous drive achievement, calling it “special because the coast-to-coast drive was a major goal for the autopilot team from the start.” He recalled “marathon clip review sessions late into the night” spent analyzing interventions and planning projects to eliminate them entirely.The milestone comes amid ongoing tension between Karpathy and Musk. Earlier in December, Musk responded sharply to Karpathy’s praise of both Tesla and Waymo systems, claiming the former AI director’s perspective was outdated and that “Tesla AI software has advanced vastly beyond what it was when he left” in 2022.Despite Musk’s public overture—”Andrej, my long lost brother, let us work together again!”—Karpathy has shown no signs of returning to Tesla.
