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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

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

#111

Post by objektif »

xvilka wrote: post #97
jimrandomh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.

Well good ideas from capitalism does not apply to public projects did you not know?

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

yholio wrote: post #73
lightgreen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dedicated and physically separated lanes We already have trams.

They can route people from fixed point A to point B, and some locations along a predetermined rute from A to B. Personal rapid transit allows a Many to Many mapping, just like cars.

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by cycrutchfield »

d1zzy wrote: post #65
not_a_moth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ba…

Yes, according to Karpathy. The cars upload data (typically still images) which are then labeled by humans and used as training data to improve the models.

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

#114

Post by objektif »

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?

What if we replace them with cheap light signals?

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

#115

Post by toomuchtodo »

maxerickson wrote: post #105
toomuchtodo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a defined level of vehicle autonomy by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated...

I think they mean the green bits there are the part where the car can be relied on to drive by itself (with the blue bits requiring constant attention). Arguing about what to call it is boring. Is Tesla close to having a system that can drive without attention, decide it isn't sure what to do and safely request driver attention? Or does it just have the bit that can successfully navigate a lot of situations?

Having driven across the US almost 30k miles on Navigate On Autopilot in our Teslas, I’d argue the former (“Is Tesla close to having a system that can drive without attention, decide it isn't sure what to do and safely request driver attention?”). Attention is given, but intervention is rare, even in construction zones (only done when zones are inactive, not with workers present for obvious reasons). Interstate to interstate transitions, passing of slow vehicles without our intervention (“lane changes without confirmation” feature) is mostly flawless.

Edit: if I didn’t make it clear, Tesla vehicles safely hand over responsibility to the driver when path planning confidence has been lost. If you don’t take over, the vehicle comes to a stop with the hazards on. If you haven’t, I recommend taking a free test drive yourself to better understand the system constraints and UX.

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

#116

Post by cycrutchfield »

xvilka wrote: post #97
jimrandomh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.

Yeah, just bulldoze some houses and apartment blocks, so easy to build rail lines. Why didn’t anybody else try this?

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

#117

Post by babesh »

djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

3 billion per mile for the Downtown Extension in San Francisco.

https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...

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

#118

Post by yarg »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45
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…

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

People manage to drive with eyes only - and with a far more restricted perspective than a ring of cameras around the car.

I do think Musk was (in part) wrong about LIDAR - I imagine that it could provide a valuable source of supplemental data to be used in training and classification.

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

#119

Post by xdavidliu »

nemothekid wrote: post #92
CamelCaseName wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Information is a fairly reputable source, but I understand your frustration. I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed. To answer your question, Outline.com doesn't seem to work here.

> I feel as though paywalled links should be heavily downweighted as most of the discussion will uninformed. Incredibly frustrating to read comments like this. We can't rely on ad funded and corporate funded journalism forever. Downweighting actual attempts to fund real journalism is completely misguided.

This argument doesn't make sense. The purpose of this site is to discuss articles and other things. A prerequisite to discussing an article is to read more than its title. Sure, "real journalism" is good to have, but given that posts like this are allowed, what fraction of commenters in threads like this will sign up and support non-corporate journalism, and what fraction will clutter up the thread with uninformed comments?
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