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Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

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Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#141

Post by modeless »

dev_dull wrote: post #133
haberman wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ordered a Tesla Model 3 yesterday. When I see the "Full Self-Driving Capability" checkbox at checkout time (it's an option you can pay $3,000 for right now) I just have zero confidence that they can deliver on this. Almost every other aspect of the car is fantastic. But Tesla's delusions about achieving full self-driving with their current approach just make me lose some respect for them. It makes me worried that t…

Are the model 3 hardware modular? For example, is it possible they’ll have you bring it to the dealer in a few years and get outfitted with these new chips?

Yes, Musk said that on the earnings call. But the hardware upgrade is not the hard part of self driving. At least they have stopped claiming that their current hardware is powerful enough for full self driving already, which was a ridiculous and worrying position for them to take.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#142

Post by DmenshunlAnlsis »

xedeon wrote: post #135
DmenshunlAnlsis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until they admit that they need LIDAR too... Cha Ching! Various Autopilot accidents strongly imply that whatever the computer “brain” is doing doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have sufficient “eyes” to actually see things like a fire truck, cop car, or bollard.

Again with the LIDAR argument... Humans drive using only eyes (computer vision) and having a sense of location (localization/3D maps). Early autonomous test vehicles used LIDARS because camera and compute tech are not at the same level they are today. It's a legacy system and more of a shortcut. In essence, Object recognition > LIDAR judging distances. Yeah it's true that a vision based system is much harder to solve…

Again with the LIDAR argument... Humans drive using only eyes (computer vision) and having a sense of location (localization/3D maps).

As has been discussed in some depth here before you commented, computer vision hooked up to some ML doesn’t come close to human eyes controlled by a human brain trained for many years.

Early autonomous test vehicles used LIDARS because camera and compute tech are not at the same level they are today. It's a legacy system and more of a shortcut. In essence, Object recognition > LIDAR judging distances.

Waymo is the cutting edge if you believe what people here say on thread after thread about them, and the raw stats. I’m sure they’ll be interested to hear your view of their “legacy” tech.

Yeah it's true that a vision based system is much harder to solve. However if Tesla cracks it, it will pay dividends.

Finally, reality. Yes, if they do something they’re yet to do, and their cars stop ramming stationary objects, then maybe something else will happen. No one is contesting that, there are just doubts given the state of Autopilot vs. leaders in the field, not to mention Tesla’s dodgy PR in general, and in the face of fatal incidents in particular.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#143

Post by wyldfire »

tomp wrote: post #137
Fricken wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only commenting on what little there is to glean about the compute, but there are so many other red flags about their autonomous development strategy. Crippling per-unit cost constraints, No Lidar, SLAM-lite, ANN heavy, insufficient redundancy and they've got a major data collection problem because they're relying on what they can get over the air. Plus Musk scared away most of their their top engineers.

Serious question- why is LIDAR so important? Obviously it’s possible to drive without it (humans do it), so it’s conceivable that eventually machines will be able to do it as well... So I’m guessing your point is, that won’t happen anytime soon and LIDAR is the fastest way to market; can you confirm/expand/clarify?

The standard of safety for autonomous drivers will have to be far beyond parity with humans. Humans cause car accidents all the time. LIDAR gives unambiguous depth and probably much easier object segmentation, no complexity or reasoning required like computing from stereo images.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#144

Post by gamblor956 »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #117
mrfredward wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"It's scary when a company with chronic implementation issues decides to take on a hard problem that is way outside its core competency." This seems like the biography of Elon Musk's companies. He gets a crazy hard problem that people say he and his companies can not do, then he tries to implement it, often falling well behind and well short of the goalposts due to lack of foresight and overambitious scheduling. Ther…

What crazy hard problems have his companies solved?

Spaceflight was solved decades before Elon was born. Reusable rockets weren't a hard problem--they were simply a problem the incumbents were unwilling to address because it would have massively cut into their revenues and profits.

Electric cars actually predated ICE cars. The issue with EVs was always the charging infrastructure, which Tesla solved...by simply throwing a lot of money at it. (Not hard, just resource intensive.) Their batteries are built by Panasonic.

Boring Co literally is just a used tunneling machine. They have literally not done anything with it except test it out below the SpaceX parking lot (and the innovation in boring would come not from the tunneling but with the post-tunneling construction of the tunnel walls, stations, dirt removal, and ultimate extraction of the boring machine).

Even at Paypal, their biggest innovation was developed by Musk's biggest pre-Paypal competitor (Thiel's company) before they merged to form PayPal.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#145

Post by jey »

tomp wrote: post #137
Fricken wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only commenting on what little there is to glean about the compute, but there are so many other red flags about their autonomous development strategy. Crippling per-unit cost constraints, No Lidar, SLAM-lite, ANN heavy, insufficient redundancy and they've got a major data collection problem because they're relying on what they can get over the air. Plus Musk scared away most of their their top engineers.

Serious question- why is LIDAR so important? Obviously it’s possible to drive without it (humans do it), so it’s conceivable that eventually machines will be able to do it as well... So I’m guessing your point is, that won’t happen anytime soon and LIDAR is the fastest way to market; can you confirm/expand/clarify?

Sure, but then you're still left with the unsolved problem of getting lidar quality depth maps out of video in all lighting and weather conditions.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#146

Post by mrguyorama »

27182818284 wrote: post #114
mhneu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. Security compromise is the huge achilles heel of self-driving cars - and anything that is algorithmically controlled. When you have 100,000 self-driving cars on the road, and someone figures out how to hack them, and drive them simultaneously into crowds, that will be a BIG BIG problem. And this problem isn't just about self-driving cars. It is a fundamental issue with all algorithms. It's a lot harder to hack h…

Has a flight ever been brought down through a cyberattack? I've heard a lot of concern over that over the years, but (thank goodness) I don't recall any news of an actual flight being brought down.

The difference is the massive amounts of regulations concerning flight systems.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#147

Post by xedeon »

opencl wrote: post #125
xedeon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon mentioned on the Q2 conference call yesterday that specific demo is easily doable. He also added that it would be sort of cheating, because that's a very defined route and he prefers it to be able to be much more dynamic. i.e. pick any two US cites and the car will drive you there.

Elon said the exact same thing in the Q4 2017 earnings call. And then said they would still do the demo in the next 3-6 months. It's been 6 months and this "easily doable" demo has still not been done. Tesla has shown zero evidence of their self driving program making any meaningful progress. http://www.autonews.com/article/20180208/MOBILITY/180209770/...

>Tesla has shown zero evidence of their self driving program making any meaningful progress.

Google's autonomous efforts far precedes Tesla, yet they have not out in the market yet. I would say on the contrary, they made significant strides in a short amount of time even after a complete overhaul Mobileye (AP1) to an in-house solution (AP2/2.5) https://vimeo.com/192179727

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#148

Post by martythemaniak »

haberman wrote: post #119
Fricken wrote: post #45

Right now, with HW2 Tesla is in kind of an awkward no man's land where their hardware is overkill for basic ADAS, but nowhere near enough for any kind of autonomy that allows the driver to turn their attention away from the driving task. By going to a custom ASIC with inferencing. I have little doubt about Musk's claim that it'll offer a 10x improvement over the current stripped down PX Drive2 variant for deep learni…

I ordered a Tesla Model 3 yesterday. When I see the "Full Self-Driving Capability" checkbox at checkout time (it's an option you can pay $3,000 for right now) I just have zero confidence that they can deliver on this. Almost every other aspect of the car is fantastic. But Tesla's delusions about achieving full self-driving with their current approach just make me lose some respect for them. It makes me worried that t…

This is a commonly missed point. You can buy the car today and be very happy with a fantastic car as it is. I did and I'm quite happy, you'll probably be very satisfied as well. I didn't even buy the EAP, as I don't do much highway driving and I think almost no one actually buys the FSD.

Having said that, I find it hilarious that people on here have such immensely strong opinions about something that doesn't exist. They'll go at length about how LIDAR is a hard requirement, about how many FLOPs you need, etc etc etc. Fact: FSD doesn't exist and no one has it. Nobody knows which approach will work and if more than one approach works no one knows the timelines or economics of the different approaches and very certainly no one knows the market impact of these. But people start thinking they know the future and then become very emotionally vested in their make-believe stories.

It's actually quite simple: companies sell you stuff, buy it if you want it/need it. Today Waymo sells me nothing, Cruise/GM sells me nothing, Tesla sells me a great BEV with Level 2 driving assistance. I got the car, but not the level 2 because it doesn't fit my driving needs. If they start selling level 3-4-5, I'll buy it if the price is right and I need it.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#149

Post by gamblor956 »

xedeon wrote: post #135
DmenshunlAnlsis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until they admit that they need LIDAR too... Cha Ching! Various Autopilot accidents strongly imply that whatever the computer “brain” is doing doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have sufficient “eyes” to actually see things like a fire truck, cop car, or bollard.

Again with the LIDAR argument... Humans drive using only eyes (computer vision) and having a sense of location (localization/3D maps). Early autonomous test vehicles used LIDARS because camera and compute tech are not at the same level they are today. It's a legacy system and more of a shortcut. In essence, Object recognition > LIDAR judging distances. Yeah it's true that a vision based system is much harder to solve…

LIDAR provides more than just distances. With full-360 LIDAR you also get object edges in 3d space, which means you can do object recognition on the LIDAR results.

In other words, you get everything that vision systems would offer except color, without having to do any processing to calculate depth, so you can go straight to the object-recognition and navigation processing.

LIDAR > vision systems.

Re: Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

#150

Post by mrguyorama »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #94
Nae3Au5x wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quali…

Whenever someone labels something "Politically impossible" I laugh.

America banned alcohol by an amendment, pretty much the hardest political barrier we have

It's just an excuse IMO

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