Episode 355 | Self-Driving on 33 Watts: How HYPR Labs Trained a Model for Just $850
Description
Tim Kentley Klay, CEO & co-founder of HYPRLABS, joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss how the company is achieving autonomous driving in downtown San Francisco using just 33 watts of compute and zero simulation or HD maps. By prioritizing "learning velocity," HYPR utilizes an end-to-end neural network that learns continuously from real-world driving data, avoiding the structural noise injected by classical simulation and hand-coded heuristics.
While the industry often relies on massive engineering teams and brute-force compute, HYPRLABS is executing a high-efficiency strategy with a team of just four engineers and a foundational model trained for only $850. Drawing inspiration from DeepMind’s AlphaZero, the company allows the AI to model the environment without predefined rules, using their autonomous vehicle fleet as a validation platform for a new category of robots launching next year.
Episode Chapters
0:00 Introduction to HYPRDRIVE
1:30 HYPRDRIVE
5:40 Learning Velocity
8:10 Building HYPR
12:23 Training the System
18:55 The Origins of the HYPR Approach
21:36 Building Trust
23:35 Simulation
27:07 $850 to Train the Model
30:44 HYPR Robots
33:22 Cameras
35:16 What's Next
Recorded on Sunday, December 14, 2025
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