Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by sandworm101 » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

throwaway648 wrote: post #163

tomp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Estimating distances robustly is very important for navigation. LIDAR is accurate at relevant distances and most importantly very robust against environmental effects. Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes) but that is very demanding, not that accurate, and very error prone. Sure, human can do it somewhat well, but eye and brain are extremely complex things to implement (and it still…

>> Without LIDAR you can use stereoscopic vision (like human with two eyes) but that is very demanding, not that accurate, and very error prone.

Because that isn't how people judge distances, at least not distances beyond a few feet in front of their faces. Plenty of people with only one eye do very well. It is a difficult problem because we use a variety of techniques and 'hardware' when estimating distances and speeds. Car companies are trying to do with one tool (ie lidar) something we do with many.

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

#172

Post by nickik » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #144

WhompingWindows wrote: post #117

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." 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 throw…

Everybody including every other space CEO, people from all levels of NASA and pretty much everybody that is innvolved in Space is giving SpaceX top marks on innovation on almost every single level, production, operation, technology and so on.

But of course you know much better how simple all these things are. For you to disagree with that is just emberecing yourself.

The same applies in a lesser degree to your other comments. Do you seriously belive that the origonal EV in 1900 was the end of development and all Tesla did was 'throw money at it'? That is the hight of stupidity and you again wont find a single expert on the subject agreeing with you.

Also the battery chemstry is co-licenced by Tesla and Panasonic with the design of the cells and even part of the chemistry being inhouse at Tesla. Panasonic can not sell this technology.

So when you are spreading baseless FUD, at least get your information correct.

You seem to have lost all rationality in context to of this question.

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

#173

Post by mhermher » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

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?

I find the "humans can do it with eyes" argument pretty weak. Humans also have brains, which are doing most of the heavy lifting. With something like LIDAR, you're shifting more of that heavy lifting into the sensors, so that you don't have to go as deep into trying emulate the human brain in processing. It's such an obvious point.

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

#174

Post by ethbro » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #168

ethbro wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I'm from, small humans typically locomote with around 6-10 months of life experience. And fairly reliably. YMMV

Would you be fine with letting a 10 months old walk around town unsupervised? Or drive a car?

If I trained a child to drive, I'd be comfortable letting them drive at 6. I believe I was around that age the first time I drove (handling steering, with assistance on gas / brake). My memory is that the only difficult part was a lack of power steering on hilly terrain.

Same age for walking around town unsupervised: the Japanese do and don't seem to lose many.

My original point was focused on the technical feasibility of driving with limited sensor input, which is physically possible.

Whether or not it takes a week, a month, or a million experience-years is a computational and algorithm problem.

All of which (based on previous technological progression) appear to be tractable.

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

#175

Post by nickik » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

DmenshunlAnlsis wrote: post #5

coob wrote: post #2

So much for no new hardware required for L5

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.

Yeah, lets make our analysis on a bunch of early mistakes and draw conclusions from there.

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

#176

Post by nickik » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

rohit2412 wrote: post #138

toomuchtodo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to be 100% right to be profitable and have loyal customers (clearly).

They'll still sell cars sure. But Elon musk will fall off his narcissistic pedestal. Does that matter? I dunno

Elon does not fall of anything. He will just admit that he was wrong and move on.

Its only Elon Musk haters that somehow want to proclaim every mistake of him as some sort of fall from grace where finally his auro of diseption will be lifted from his victims.

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

#177

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

rohit2412 wrote: post #138

toomuchtodo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to be 100% right to be profitable and have loyal customers (clearly).

They'll still sell cars sure. But Elon musk will fall off his narcissistic pedestal. Does that matter? I dunno

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by nickik » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #17

coob wrote: post #2

So much for no new hardware required for L5

When you buy a Model 3 you can choose to pay up front for self driving. I'm assuming that this would be an included upgrade if you did so, so who cares.

Not sure why you are downvoted. It was clear from the beginning that you will get as good an autopilote as the car can manage on that hardware.

If you pay for self-drive you will get an update.

Elon has always said it should be enough and if not you get an upgrade.

But some nuonce is lost in all his statments ofter it got threw the hype and couter hype cycle.

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

#179

Post by dsfyu404ed » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

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…

>Much stronger and harsher enforcement of traffic laws.

I'm sure that making the primary means of long (greater than walking) distance transportation for the majority of the population more expensive and higher stakes is going to work out great in the long term. I can see the parallels with healthcare. Creating yet another part of life where a single screw up that is capable of ruining the financial well being of someone living slightly better than paycheck to paycheck is not going to do positive things in the long run.

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

#180

Post by _louisr_ » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #164

_louisr_ wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reusable rockets weren't a hard problem Armchair engineer over here

I'm willing to back up my statements with my existing login, and I don't need to be an engineer to read the history of resuable launch systems. They've been around since the 1960s, and space-capable launch systems were a thing in the 1980s. They were killed the first time around by the collapse of the USSR, and then again when the Iridium went bankrupt, eliminating the demand.

You have nothing to back up the statement that "reusable rockets are not a hard problem", and let me back up this claim of mine by pointing out that only partial reusability exists today. In addition I invite you to build reusable rocket systems, sir, since you have already claimed that the problem is "easy". You could make some good money solving that problem, and you would once and for all put this argument to bed.