Here is the link to the recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE
Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
191–200 of 550 posts
Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#192At the tail end of Karpathy's presentation, he said something that reminded me of why Peter Norvig decided to join Google: because that's where the data is. In Tesla's case, they have a unique and likely accelerating advantage in having the best source of data up on which to train their models. I think this forms the basis of an enduring moat relative to their other competitors, none of which are collecting data at the same scale.
Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#193I'm sorry but I'm finding it really difficult to watch this and match up what the engineer is saying to what Elon Musk is saying. For example, the engineer says the custom ASIC does 144 TOps for 2 chips vs the NVidia drive Xavier - does 21 TOps. Okay, well yeah I expect your custom ASIC does have a nice performance advantage over the equivalent GPU. at 3.5x advantage probably seems reasonable. Cue Elon Musk: "At firs…
I think the part that Elon, and the engineer, are trying to express that you are looking past is "A dot product with some memory attached" is what they need to do low latency image inference on the camera data.
They don't need a multipurpose CPU/GPU, they have a single well defined task that dominates their compute needs. They built a chip to do this that is cost and power effective, and redundant for safety.
Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#194The thing I don't get about Tesla is why they keep heaping more on their plate rather than just (for large values of just) re-doing the motive power bit. That alone is a massive challenge and it is not something they've licked at economies of scale that allow a $10K vehicle to be brought to market, which is what it will take to really make this a success. Every extra they tack on to the base product is one they will…
First of all, a lot of these things are orthogonal. With that I mean, that they are independant from each other. The self-driving effort interacted only minimally with getting the Model 3 production up and running. As long as the money does not run out, it makes sense to do things in parallel, which are parallizeable. On the other side, Musk has a big picture in mind, which stretches quite a bit into the future. So these "side shows" actually fit together. You use solar cells to produce electricity, which you store in your power wall which can power your electric car.
If Musks ideas about self-driving actually become true, he holds the holy grail of the car industry. On one side, self-driving abilities become crucial in future car sales. On the other side, if he can make the Tesla car sharing network happen, the revenue of that could be a magnitude or more larger than the one of car selling. This would justify some of the crazier valuations of Tesla stock.
Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#195Interesting pieces: - First principles hardware design of focused self driving computer (many times better than any competing existing hardware). Already shipping in all newly produced cars. Currently working on next gen that will be 3x better to ship in a couple years. - Lidar is an unnecessary mistake that competitors are making that won't succeed (too expensive, need too many, unnecessary). - Real world fleet test…
> Lidar is an unnecessary mistake that competitors are making This is very controversial and rest of the industry thinks exact opposite, many even claiming that Tesla is being irresponsible and even delusional in trying to do autonomy without lidar. The main points I have heard in favor of lidar are that computer vision is very flaky not only in suboptimal weather but even in good weather. Cameras are simply no where…
I think it also fundamentally depends on the business model being pursued:
- If you are trying to sell the Model 3 directly to the end consumer with autonomous mode, the extra $10K for Lidar and bulk (which will greatly effect the exterior design) are definitely non-starters.
- If you are going to robo-taxi route (such as Waymo and Uber), the extra one time $10K cost to add lidar for the 5 year life of the car is probably a blip on the income statement of the operator as compared to a full time human driver which probably costs $10K PER MONTH for the lifetime of the service. For the robo-taxi business model - its a bit of a no brainer - they could stick every sensor known to man on the car and still make out like a warlord by getting rid of the human driver but maintained a 100% safety record. Plus making the car stand-out with a unique Lidar inclusive shape is a great marketing differentiator. Also reduces your liability if a taxi rider ever sues since you can claim you have redundancy in the system.
Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#196Is there a link to a replay of the live stream? The link on the Tesla IR site just takes me to their main page.
Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#197Holy cow Elon said a lot of things that will drastically change the world in the next 2-3-5 years. I think it's very, very clear they've been doing a lot of stuff behind that scenes that nobody has given them credit for over these last 5 years. Everyone thought they were just throwing everything at the Model 3 ramp and doing nothing else, but it turns out the opposite is true. At the end Elon said autonomy is basical…
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Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if he's going to explain this position at all? Or if it's just posturing against Waymo et al. Seems like more data is always better than less data for this application?
Because lidar is expensive, error-prone, and can't be created without flaws. So if you make a car LIdar will fail way before camera. The only problem is if camera only can work
All sensors and the systems they operate with have flaws. There is no way around this - it's just the real world. Even cameras will have flaws, or they can develop them over time (lens degradation, image sensor dropping pixels or gaining stuck pixels, etc).
That is point behind what is known as "probabilistic robotics" - the real world has noise, and you need to be able to deal with it. Don't expect perfect sensors, don't expect a perfect environment.
Self-driving vehicles are the application of probabilistic robotic principles to a real-world task - quite possibly one of the most difficult tasks for the field. To be quite honest, it's amazing how well it's worked in such a short period of time.
I think cameras and machine vision approaches will be needed for self-driving vehicles to be fully successful, but I wouldn't say that LIDAR should be counted out. It will probably be necessary - even required - to have all of the sensors currently being used, not just a subset.
One kind of sensor that hasn't been explored much that I think will be needed is some kind of audio input; some kind of wide-range microphone (probably binaural or stereo) to take in environmental audio and use that for driving cues. Some simple examples might be for vehicle horns, or the squeal of tires, or the revving up of an engine indicating someone is speeding up aggressively, or an emergency siren, etc.
There may even be other sensors needed or that could provide other data to fill in certain gaps of environment knowledge to help a self-driving vehicle navigate. I don't think any one or another should be discounted.
Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#199...out of all the things I expected to see from a Tesla stream, I definitely did not expect a 25 minute discussion on the cost of 32bit additions, dot products, sram bandwidth, and chip design, at the level of a third year college hardware course.
I keep saying this he knows what he doing. You can tell he knows what's happening. Which is rare for a CEO to know this level of detail.
Funny, I get the opposite impression; the more I hear Musk talk about technical specifications, the less I think he actually understands.
Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vision is probablistic. You can improve your probabilities with more data and deeper nets, but the probability is never 100%. Inferring depth using triangulation of extracted features using vision is also probabilistic. Lidar gives you very rudimentary depth and positional data, but it is precise, and reliable, and the false positives are low. Lidar is not seeing the world as a series of probabilistic phantasms that…
I believe he claimed that they did have all of the sensors they need with hardware v2, and they had no need for LIDAR. We'll see if that's true. One thing that stood out to me is that he said they only need radar in front because you're only moving fast in that direction. Does that mean the cars will be susceptible to T-bone accidents?
I don't know, I guess it will be born out in the data, but I hope they aren't seriously planning to drive people through busy intersections where T-bones are likely to happen under the auspices that what they've got is a level 3/4 system.
Waymo's safetly critical disengagements are at 1 every 11,000 miles. Fender benders happen about once every 100,000 miles, so just on that Waymo is off by an order of magnitude, and Waymo spares no expense on compute or sensors.