Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 146 posts

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#51

Post by cbhl »

hueving wrote: post #27
Animats wrote: post #6

Now this is doing it right. That's how car companies do it. Big test tracks, and years of test track time, plus simulation and test rigs. As the article points out, Google has far more autonomous driving miles than everybody else put together. They're on the hard cases, too; not just driving on freeways.

Do they have anything that works in rain/snow?

Snow is challenging because the lane markers are obscured by the snow -- human drivers guess at where the lanes should be, or remember where the lanes were yesterday.

Tesla being able to record sensor/map data from human drivers driving through snow will help them mitigate this. On the other hand, electric batteries have less range in cold whether, so I imagine that in the near term electric cars will be less popular in snowy markets versus, say, California.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#52

Post by baq »

nopinsight wrote: post #19

The fact that Waymo revealed their "secret" tools for advancing this crucial technology implies that either: 1) They believe no one can quite catch up before they can launch the technology. Since they know several competitors have huge resources and brilliant people, it means they are quite close to launch. 2) These tools have become open secret within the industry, so no harm is done to their competitive position by…

I'd also say it's 2 and the piece is about bringing the cool factor up so recruiting is easier.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#53

Post by iUsedToCode »

bit_logic wrote: post #48

Self driving cars is based on machine learning which is basically processing massive amounts of past data. This is great for routine situations and it seems Waymo is making good progress covering most of these. However the key weakness is the lack of true intelligence. When anything unusual or unexpected happens, the best it can do is simply safely shutdown and wait for a human to intervene. And the car can't really…

There arent that many novel scenarios on the road. Sure, Google can't program around the possibility of an airplane falling down on you, but how often does that happen?

It doesn't have to be perfect. Just very good and improving. Some time ago google shared a gif of a wheelchair chasing a duck in the middle of the road. The car didn't understand it, so it just stopped. Good enough for me.

Obviously, they have a lot of work ahead of them, but don't be so pessimistic. Most people drive shitty (myself included), we aren't impossible to improve upon.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#54

Post by flamedoge »

bit_logic wrote: post #48

Self driving cars is based on machine learning which is basically processing massive amounts of past data. This is great for routine situations and it seems Waymo is making good progress covering most of these. However the key weakness is the lack of true intelligence. When anything unusual or unexpected happens, the best it can do is simply safely shutdown and wait for a human to intervene. And the car can't really…

I can see how obtaining training data is difficult. majority of data would be non-accidents.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#55

Post by Fricken »

nopinsight wrote: post #19

The fact that Waymo revealed their "secret" tools for advancing this crucial technology implies that either: 1) They believe no one can quite catch up before they can launch the technology. Since they know several competitors have huge resources and brilliant people, it means they are quite close to launch. 2) These tools have become open secret within the industry, so no harm is done to their competitive position by…

The article is some good colour commentary on what's going on inside Waymo, there's some fresh information here regarding the scale of their operation, but nothing about the fundamentals are any kind of a reveal. The principles of Waymo's development strategy have been well scrutinized throughout the industry. The other thing is that everything that Waymo has publicly revealed has been at least a year old.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#56

Post by peoplewindow »

Animats wrote: post #6

Now this is doing it right. That's how car companies do it. Big test tracks, and years of test track time, plus simulation and test rigs. As the article points out, Google has far more autonomous driving miles than everybody else put together. They're on the hard cases, too; not just driving on freeways.

Well, do they have hard cases?

I was surprised to read in the article that they were flummoxed by roundabouts, of all things. And that they were apparently surprised to discover that multi-lane roundabouts even exist at all. Have none of these engineers ever gone on holiday to Europe? If they think a multi-lane roundabout is an advanced case, what will they make of this?

https://www.wired.com/2016/08/brilliant-sorcery-englands-7-c...

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#57

Post by flamedoge »

> But Peng also presented the position of the traditional automakers. He said that they are trying to do something fundamentally different. Instead of aiming for the full autonomy moon shot, they are trying to add driver-assistance technologies, “make a little money,” and then step forward toward full autonomy. It’s not fair to compare Waymo, which has the resources and corporate freedom to put a $70,000 laser range finder on top of a car, with an automaker like Chevy that might see $40,000 as its price ceiling for mass-market adoption.

> “GM, Ford, Toyota, and others are saying ‘Let me reduce the number of crashes and fatalities and increase safety for the mass market.’ Their target is totally different,” Peng said. “We need to think about the millions of vehicles, not just a few thousand.”

I wonder if an easier task to reduce fatalities is to target impaired driving and develop a detection mechanism that tries to identify whether the driver is impaired. It seems like an easier and more localized problem than building a fully autonomous vehicle.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#58

Post by peoplewindow »

dlubarov wrote: post #13
arcanus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that AI is over-hyped. However, I think the research environment is not as likely to dry up this time. That is because much of the machine learning research is coming from industry, particularly the mega-corps. And for extremely important disruptive events such as AI, they are willing to drop $$ into collecting a stable of research scientists to not fall behind in this space. So while the AI winter w…

Agreed. As a Google engineer, I think a lot of our AI efforts are "safe" (as in we'll keep investing in them for a long time) because they're already providing substantial business value. For example, - TTS and speech synthesis have lots of uses in Android (phones, Wear, Auto, etc.) - Object recognition is very useful for photo search - Face recognition is also useful for photo search (if you tag people in Google Pho…

I doubt Google will cut back any time soon, but as a former Google engineer, I find this an entertaining definition of business value ;)

How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no ads in it.

Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least for US English and outside of highly technical jargon? Speech patterns change slowly, so would Android continue to make money if investment in speech R&D were cut back? My guess is yes, it'd be fine.

Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way? I don't mean "well it's neat to have translation links in web search", I mean, would people cut back on the commercial queries that are Google's main source of income if Translate quality stopped improving? I doubt it.

Much of their products are like this. They're products but they aren't businesses. It's very easy to lose sight of the basics of business when inside the Google bubble. The things you mention are not providing business value in the conventional sense of the term because they aren't yielding independent profits. So they're all vulnerable.

That said, vulnerable to what? I think Google is at risk of losing a lot of trust around web search and political and informational search more generally, but commercial queries are probably pretty much impregnable.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#59

Post by apk17 »

stevenwoo wrote: post #25
pgodzin wrote: post #23

Really well-written and engaging article. It seems the main point of an article like this from Google's perspective is gaining the public's trust. I'm sure most people are worried about the edge-cases that are so hard to run into in the real world, but are so important to get right. This is Google saying "we may not see that edge-case exactly, but we know when it could happen and simulate the situation a million time…

I occassionally come across construction that is marked in an unusual way - at 65 miles an hour when the speed limit is 75. Also, when they are changing freeways and restriping them (leaving the original old faded lanes and before new lines go up) sometimes it's confusing to me and the traffic is flowing at 80 miles an hour, IIRC this was happening on 880 for a while about 10 years back. If the AI is confused by a ro…

They might want to look at https://www.google.de/maps/@48.4020174,9.9783793,159m/data=!... - the lower right part confuses drivers very much as well.

Re: Inside Waymo's Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

#60

Post by ipsum2 »

stirlo wrote: post #41

Looks like this is the location of the test facility they talk about... https://www.google.com.au/maps/@37.3705986,-120.5747932,237m... Interesting choice of name for their Expressway... EDIT: Apple maps has up to date satellite imagery https://maps.apple.com/?q=37.3718,-120.5749&t=k

Curious - does anyone know why the Apple maps redirect to Google maps? I'm on Chrome.
Post reply on HN