Maybe now Teslas will actually brake before crashing into a concrete barrier.
Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
91–100 of 238 posts
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worry less about software / hardware crashes leading to death and more about cyberattack. I've written about it before[0]: We need regulations before a mass breach of autonomous systems happens. Not after. This whole bullshit where corporations claim all sorts of things about their security then get owned trivially has happened for every OS and device out there. The supposedly secure QNX was installed into countles…
We already have a number on embedded processors and controllers in cars today, including systems responsible for critical operational parts of the car. How autonomous systems will make anything different? Why do you believe people aren't currently hacking cars? I don't intend to be critical at all, I believe this is a very interesting point too that should be discussed. (I hope to check the links on my interval).
> We already have a number on embedded processors and controllers in cars today, including systems responsible for critical operational parts of the car.
> How autonomous systems will make anything different? Why do you believe people aren't currently hacking cars?
It might make always on data connections near-mandatory (to get maps data, etc). At least in my car, the insecure embedded computers are air-gapped from the internet.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#93Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the same sense that any object that can potentially kill someone (hint: everything) is a weapon. Which is technically correct but a useless observation. It's not useless; the damage that can be caused varies by degree between things. Then you have to look at two cases - suitability for object to be used as a weapon, and the damage it can cause on accident. Unlike knives or hammers, both those factors are very hi…
I was quibbling about semantics. I am aware that cars can be dangerous. > and the damage it can cause on accident You are conflating (un)safety of a tool used in the way it is intended (kitchen knife = cutting a steak) with accidents (cutting a finger) and with malicious use (stabbing people). Those three categories are not the same for object-that-may-act-as-weapon and object-designed-as-weapon. Conflating them coll…
> So are you concerned about Tesla intentionally building killing instruments? Or potential for accidents? Or the potential for intentional misuse?
The latter two.
> We could drive down the number of morons by requiring astronaut training for vehicle operators but again, that tradeoff seems too harsh and it's more efficient to occasionally let people die in traffic accidents than letting them die because nobody qualified as ambulance driver.
I don't think this is the real reason. You don't need astronaut-level training for vehicle operators, just more than the ridiculously low standard of today, and more importantly, much stronger and harsher enforcement of traffic laws. I doubt that this will reduce the number of qualified ambulance drivers.
I suspect the real reason we tolerate so many morons on the road is path dependence. When cars first appeared, they were rare, slow and safe. In the couple of decades it took to get to the present density and speed of cars, it became a social status symbol, and something politically impossible to rein in.
> What is important is to make sure that they are as good as or better than humans once they roll out in large fleets.
I'm afraid that with self-driving tech based on neural networks, with no ability to inspect and verify what's going on, we'll eventually have to eat the risk and roll them out in large numbers before we know they're as good as humans.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adversarial examples are a thing even for humans, and yet here we are.
And we should be able to do better with our technology, instead of throwing shit ton of compute at black boxes no one understands, hoping it will all somehow work out in the end.
Do you think Waymo's systems are a black box that no one at Waymo's understands?
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have also conflated silicon and silicone, which is humorous.
Blame the English language for making the name of 2 popular industrial materials with such similar names.
I think I'd blame the English language for the same word havint two different meanings. Not two different words meaning two different things.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#97We knew this almost a year ago [1]. Tesla held a panel discussion during NIPS 2017 in Long Beach where Elon Musk, Andrej Karpathy, and Jim Keller talked about AI. (I was at the event.) Jim and Elon talked briefly about how their hardware will overcome the limitations of current GPUs by making the bus massively parallel, along with other interesting tid-bits.
Here's the direct link to my notes from the event: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/7iczp7/elon_mu...
[1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/08/elon_musk_finally_a...
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blame the English language for making the name of 2 popular industrial materials with such similar names.
I think I'd blame the English language for the same word havint two different meanings. Not two different words meaning two different things.
That's a very Right opinion, even though it may not be right. You do have that right, however. Anyway, I've got to get back to work right away.
Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#99Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars
#100The most interesting question about this is what their motivation was to justify building an in-house ASIC design team. That isn't a super hard thing to do for a company of Tesla's size, but it is nontrivial and seems like a significant investment. It is probable that they got massive performance improvements by specializing their hardware, but it isn't clear that they couldn't have gotten the same perf improvement b…
It's scary when a company with chronic implementation issues decides to take on a hard problem that is way outside its core competency.
If they succeed, it means slightly improved efficiency and cutting NVidia's profit margin out of their cost structure. If they fail, it would cost billions, and obscure chip bugs could put lives at risk. That risk/reward doesn't seem worth it unless you really know what you're doing and are confident you will succeed.
Of course, it fuels the hype machine in the short term.