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Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

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Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#171

Post by soared »

samstave wrote: post #31
soared wrote: post #16

Wow. FYI - This is how you mess up content marketing. If the author genuinely wanted me to read the article and get to know the brand, he shouldn't have used such a scummy title. Yes, the article is /technically/ true. But they are only talking about the hardware, and acknowledge in the second paragraph that they don't have the software. So while the title implies self-driving cars are a solved problem, they are real…

>>> Titles like these are what happen when marketers optimize everything towards clicks, and don't care about actual impact on the brand itself. Uh, you say this as if you truly think that this is NOT the actual premise of marketing. https://youtu.be/DFCMhSzeGuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbAAVLcMzr4

Eh. I work at a digital marketing agency and plenty of brands are spending lots of money just so you hear the name and think that brand is good. Some never mention a product or a service, just pure branding.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#172

Post by skywhopper »

This article is filled with very carefully crafted language to leave the impression that this car 1) is being mass-produced, and is 2) capable of driving itself. But if you read it closely enough, it's clear that neither of these things is true.

I'm sure there's political pressure within GM for Cruise to announce these sorts of "wins" to keep management satisfied their money is being well-spent. But the breathless tone of this write-up conveys a sense of accomplishment that doesn't actually exist, and the failure to set reasonable expectations will just make the disillusionment that much stronger when it happens.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#173

Post by cozzyd »

robotresearcher wrote: post #130
adewinter wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "go L4 or L5" mean?

They are Lagrange Points. The cars don't have the hardware to reach them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point Or maybe there's some notation collision...

Pathetic, the Trojans got to L4 and L5 long ago.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#174

Post by jakelarkin »

RivieraKid wrote: post #167

I noticed that that the sentiment about self-driving cars become much more pessimistic (or more realistic) in the last few months compared to the previous hype.

thought leaders are inflecting to the Trough of Disillusionment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#175

Post by dchichkov »

elevensies wrote: post #131
arosier wrote: post #35

From my discussions with a friend with intimate knowledge of the software side of Cruise, there is wild skepticism within the co that they even have the hardware needed to go L4 or L5. Big promises being made to GM by Kyle which is leading to smoke and mirrors to distract/buy time from more critical problems "under the hood."

They say they are putting them on the roads of CA in a matter of weeks. I believe miles driven and disengagements must be reported around the end of 2017. So it should be easy enough to determine is four months or so if they're doing significant autonomous miles. ( here is the 2016 report: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/deade5b7-5b10-4b25... , found here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonom…

TLDR, in California, 2016, autonomous miles:

   Google 636k
   Cruise 10k
   Delphi 3k
   Nissan 3k
   Mercedes 0.7k 
   BMW   0.6k
   Tesla 0.6k
   Ford  0.6k
   Bosch, Honda, Volkswagen 0k

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#176

Post by adrianmacneil »

cruiseemployee wrote: post #48

deleted

Cruise employee here. I'm sorry to hear you feel that way. In my experience, Cruise is one of the most exciting companies to be working for today, and Kyle is easily the most intelligent, hard working, and reasonable CEO I have worked for.

For sure, there is still a lot of work to be done before we can launch a full L4/L5 vehicle, but I would say with high confidence our platform is ahead of most other players in the industry, and I'm confident that we will be one of the first companies to launch AVs at scale.

FWIW, Glassdoor seems to agree with me: https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Cruise-EI_IE97...

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#177

Post by bitL »

cropsieboss wrote: post #102
antirez wrote: post #4

I don't know what to believe. A few days ago I spent some time checking publicly available data and the result is that the current state of art is extremely far from an autonomous car that, could like used to drive a taxi in a busy city like Rome. Not far as "still some effort needed" but potentially "not clear when this could be available" far. Now there are those claims made by multiple companies... Go figure.

The thing is, for car driving you need combinatorial search combined with a good model (statistical) of the world. Research I've seen does not incorporate any kind of meaningful search. Company that has all the roads and surroundings scanned and knows exactly where the car is at all times is at a huge advantage. Partially observed world gets your head hurting. Not modelling other cars practically makes everything use…

> Modelling and tracking other cars is a bigger issue, including pedestrians.

Unscented Kalman filters and particle filters are used for that - they are pretty good if you sample environment with >10Hz rate. Most of what you said has been taken car of pretty well, those aren't really hot issues anymore. Also, the thinking these days is that humans (even mediocre) can do a good job driving using eyes only and more robust camera solutions based on deep learning are here. Their problem is inference speed as HW is not fast enough to allow FHD or 4K input feed to be processed realtime, so imagery has to be downscaled significantly, leading to errors. Similarly, tracking other cars only depends on how big supercomputer can you fit into your trunk.

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#178

Post by skadamat »

madmax108 wrote: post #128
arosier wrote: post #35

From my discussions with a friend with intimate knowledge of the software side of Cruise, there is wild skepticism within the co that they even have the hardware needed to go L4 or L5. Big promises being made to GM by Kyle which is leading to smoke and mirrors to distract/buy time from more critical problems "under the hood."

I've been speaking to friends working at different companies across the self-driving industry, and almost all of them have their fair share of skepticism of L4 or L5, including those who are actively researching in the field. The main reason for this is that current self-driving tech has plateaued with most companies going with the redundancy based approach (let's have 3 LIDARs instead of 1, and make that 4 IR sensor…

I recently read about Luminar (https://www.luminartech.com/) and their focus on making affordable, accurate LIDAR tech. Wonder if there are other components like this that need to be optimized and combined to get to L4 and L5

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#179

Post by bobsil1 »

jakelarkin wrote: post #174
RivieraKid wrote: post #167

I noticed that that the sentiment about self-driving cars become much more pessimistic (or more realistic) in the last few months compared to the previous hype.

thought leaders are inflecting to the Trough of Disillusionment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

More like the Winter of Artificial General Intelligence

Re: Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

#180

Post by bobsil1 »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #98
cr0sh wrote: post #80

I don't know if this is allowed - if not, mods delete this. To the poster who had a throwaway and identified themselves as an employee of Cruise, if the environment you work in is as toxic as you claim, your best bet, right now, is to leave. Don't stay a minute longer, as this kind of thing has a way of biting those who stay in the rear sooner rather than later.

The person likely has golden handcuffs that make it financially inadvisable to depart early.

LUWTV, lube up and wait to vest
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