The Unconjoined Triangle of Success

At comma, our mission is to solve self driving cars while delivering shippable intermediaries. Everything we do is derived from that mission, and as the narrative unfolds, it’s looking increasing like we will win alongside Tesla and Mobileye.

Linux, Mac, and Windows all won. OS/2 did not.

Like codebases, as companies grow, it’s best if you can factor them into separate repos with well defined APIs between them. openpilot has submodules, comma has divisions. As of this year, comma is a profitable company. With money comes growth, and with growth comes structure.

The openpilot division builds and maintains the openpilot software, which is an open source driver assistance system used by thousands of people every day. They focus on safety, stability, quality, and car support, in that order.

The research division builds the models. They make infrastructure to collect data and produce the largest supervised training datasets in the world, much larger than the 14 million samples in ImageNet. Then, using these datasets, they train models that tell the car how to drive. They also make models to monitor the driver to help ensure they are paying attention. These models ship with new releases of openpilot.

The operations division makes the product, the money, the website, and the app. They gather feedback from users to incorporate into future versions of openpilot. They design and improve our hardware. And they ship that hardware out every Monday and Thursday.

In the next three blog posts, you’ll be hearing from our Head of openpilot, Head of Research, and our newly hired Chief Operating Officer about what their division entails, who they are looking to hire, and how they are working toward the company mission.

When you apply for a job here, hopefully these posts will help you think about which division you’d like to join. The interview process varies from division to division.

George Hotz,
President @ comma.ai