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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

theinformation.com

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Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#61

Post by sien »

yholio wrote: post #30

Clearly, we should aim for a less ambitious goal: ultra-compact self driving vehicles on dedicated and physically separated lanes, where cars cannot be encountered unless it's their fault, similar to bike and tram lines. This could increase city trafic capacity by an order of magnitude in congested central zones and suplement public transport in suburban, dispersed areas that cannot be properly served by buses. And i…

There are a lot of things that are slow shuttle pods around the place. They have been deployed on several continents.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/17/17859112/self-driving-car...

Is that what you mean?

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#62

Post by maxerickson »

viburnum wrote: post #39

What I've never understood is how you're going to get a car to understand a construction worker or cop doing hand signals without artificial general intelligence. Why even bother with the car until you've figured that out in the lab?

https://www.gearbrain.com/waymo-driverless-car-hand-signals-...

I actually found that looking for a years old article about Google's system accounting for bicyclists making hand signals, but there you go.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#63

Post by rainyMammoth »

not_a_moth wrote: post #35
necubi wrote: post #12

The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…

> my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) Thought Tesla was considered first, in part because Tesla's fleet collects an orders of magnitude of data greater than others.

Tesla is not even considered in the top half of the contenders. They are the best at hyping it up though.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#64

Post by im_down_w_otp »

necubi wrote: post #12

The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…

Autonomous driving to me seems a lot like the domain of robotic crowd navigation, and the crowd navigation research seems to show us that most of the methods suspected in-use by AV programs tend to fall apart under trivial thresholds of uncertainty/congestion. So, I'm less surprised that Uber didn't make much fundamental progress here, and more surprised that anybody else has done better.

edit: I say this as someone who very much wants to see this class of science & technology succeed, but I often wonder if we're 2 or 3 Fields Medals away from really getting fundamentally closer to success.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#65

Post by d1zzy »

not_a_moth wrote: post #35
necubi wrote: post #12

The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…

> my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) Thought Tesla was considered first, in part because Tesla's fleet collects an orders of magnitude of data greater than others.

I see people keep stating this but I'm not so sure about it. Do we know what critically important data Tesla cars collect at scale _and_ are able to send back to mothership and who pays for that bandwidth/traffic? To my mind most of the useful information (video recordings or pictures of moments when the AI driver wasn't sure about things and/or human intervened) seems like it would take a lot of bandwidth to send back from moving cars.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#66

Post by phire »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #15

The real question should be: does driving a car requires human-level cognition?

Personally, I don't think so. If anything we might need less machine learning.

It's mostly a problem of sensor fusion. Once your self driving car has a good view and solid understanding of the surrounding environment, the actual driving algorithm is reasonable simple. All you really need is really solid software engineering to implement it with minimal bugs.

The problem is getting that understanding. You can't have objects pop in and out of existence. You can't have computer vision misclassifying objects or just not seeing them.

It might just require better sensors, or more types of sensors. Or we might need to work on interpreting the data and understanding the actual situation.

Most likely it's a combination of both.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#67

Post by wongarsu »

paxys wrote: post #18

No one can read this article yet it is instantly upvoted to the very top of HN. Goes to show how discussion forums like this one just serve to amplify people's existing biases rather than actually educate them on anything new.

I would frame it as "in discussion forums people upvote articles because they spark interesting discussions, even if the article is uninteresting or only available to few"

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#68

Post by AnimalMuppet »

necubi wrote: post #12

The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…

>> Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-third of a mile on average.

Pretty sure my wife would claim that I'm worse than that...

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#69

Post by Hypx »

DevKoala wrote: post #17

I am not surprised. This is a competition between Tesla and Google, technology companies. I never saw Uber, a services company, as being part of this race.

All attempts at self-driving cars are a failure so far. There are no exceptions. If Uber is struggling, they're all struggling. I expect similar if not worse stories coming out for the rest of them.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#70

Post by dylan604 »

bobbyi_settv wrote: post #9
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #4

This article is behind a subscribe wall, which isn't very conductive to sharing. But upon reading, it seems to be that the technology is just not capable of performing the task. The assumption that deep learning is sufficient to be able to drive a car may be a faulty one.

That's not what I got from the two paragraphs it's possible to read. It suggest Uber "is destined to lose the high-stakes race to its rivals, which have demonstrated a lot more headway" which sounds like it is doable, just not by them

Won't it be great if Waymo has to end up licensing the driving tech from Google/Alphabet/WhicheverCoTheyStoleFrom?

Edit: Of course I meant Uber. Doh!

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