Jim Keller confident about Tesla self-driving program

Jim Keller is sort of a mercenary in the chip industry. After working at AMD on the Zen design for about three years, Keller joined Tesla as vice president of Autopilot Hardware Engineering and another two years later he joined Intel to lead the chip giant's silicon engineering efforts.

Electrek noticed there's a new interview with Jim Keller on Lex Fridman’s AI podcast. In the interview, Keller talks fondly about Tesla's self-driving efforts. He points out that even though Elon Musk missed almost all previously set timelines, he's confident about Tesla's capability to solve self-driving.

However, Keller had an interesting comment to put the timeline misses into perspective:

“Progress disappoints in the short run, surprises in the long run.”

The engineer appeared fairly confident in Tesla and Musk’s data-based approach to self-driving and that they will solve the problem.

Musk’s latest timeline is achieving a full self-driving system by the end of the year with driver supervision and phase out driver supervision as safety improves over the next few years.