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Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

bloomberg.com

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Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#21

Other stuff from the legends at Bloomberg: SuperMicro is absolutely definitely backdooring all their motherboards with spychips to China. Sure, if you were dumb enough to believe that last time, you might consider Bloomberg a reputable source this time, but otherwise why would you?

RTFA.

This clearly is not a position that Bloomberg as a publication is taking. It’s a report on interindustry shittalk - not the highest form of reporting but not even comparable to the story you’re referencing.

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#22
nobody's autopilot will achieve full autonomy in the near future. Full autonomy actually meaning, you could rip the steering wheel out of the car and have it drive through any city you wish instead of "it drives through grid streets in American suburbs correctly like, 95% of the time"

The entire current approach has no correctness guarantees, ML systems are horrible at dealing with tail-risk, there's a human communication element to driving and so on. It's a ridiculously hard problem, honestly AGI hard.

I much more suspect that before we get autonomous driving we'll get more 'rail like' street systems, geofencing etc.. that limit how drivers and cars can behave, that's kind of how the whole hyperloop thing works ironically enough. Obviously if we wanted that we could just build better metro systems to begin with which already drive themselves.

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#23

nobody's autopilot will achieve full autonomy in the near future. Full autonomy actually meaning, you could rip the steering wheel out of the car and have it drive through any city you wish instead of "it drives through grid streets in American suburbs correctly like, 95% of the time" The entire current approach has no correctness guarantees, ML systems are horrible at dealing with tail-risk, there's a human communic…

Where do you think we are in fully autonomous planes. Curious if that problem is easier or harder than cars.

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#24
post #17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the problem is Tesla and Elon refuse to acknowledge the value of LIDAR. A fused sensor approach is the only way we're going to get full autonomy. I was in this field in 2007 on the DARPA Urban challenge so maybe the state of the art indicates otherwise now however, from the NHTSA investigations into crashes from Tesla's autopilot all of them would have been fixed with even basic LIDAR.

This baffles me as well. The technology to solve so many problems hard to approach with other tools is right there, why not use it.

Cost. Tesla has to sell cars to price-sensitive consumers. Adding a LIDAR would likely increase the price significantly. Given their business model, they basically have to argue that LIDAR is not necessary.

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#25

... says Google. But this does ring true, and the come-to-Jesus moment on Tesla’s valuation will be when people realize this is the case. If they had a legitimate shot at being the first true players in self-driving, their valuation (which currently prices them on par with something like the sum of the top three automakers...) isn’t insane. But if it really is just lane-keep assist with intelligent cruise control, I’…

Im thinking the tesla valuation is more than the car company, the car company is just making the economy of scale battery production profitable/or just funded, while the greater goal is the decentralized power generation and storage network of the solar roof + power wall. If we think of them as a energy infrastructure company + subsidiary car company/freight company (tesla semi) then I can see the valuation making some sense.

Tesla doesnt need perfect automation to handle cheap, automated, short run freight lines, leveraging clean cheap electricity, and low maintenance trucks(no ICE, less drive train maintenance, no driver time at wheel restrictions)

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#26

nobody's autopilot will achieve full autonomy in the near future. Full autonomy actually meaning, you could rip the steering wheel out of the car and have it drive through any city you wish instead of "it drives through grid streets in American suburbs correctly like, 95% of the time" The entire current approach has no correctness guarantees, ML systems are horrible at dealing with tail-risk, there's a human communic…

Tesla is 1-2 years off afaict.

Also an interesting perspective from Jim Keller, that autonomy is easier than you might believe:

https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA

I think it was in this link but not 100% sure... I watched a bunch of his interviews.

Generally speaking, I think GPT3 shows the power of raw computer in ML: https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2020/05

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#27
post #20
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is the only participant that has a true path to self driving technology. Legacy car makers are Goliaths set in the past. They're stuck to the annual release cycle and can't even over the air updates and a touch screen on par with an iPad from 8 years ago. Legacy automakers have failed to deliver on electric cars for decades. Musk talked about this. There was nothing special about the time he entered the market…

>Tesla is the only participant that has a true path to self driving technology. They dont even ship cars with Stereo front facing cameras. Eight cameras, twelve hypersonic sensors, one forward facing radar, GPS, and still no stereo vision resulting in cars plowing full speed into stationary obstacles ....

U know u can do depth perception from time without stereo cameras?

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#28

nobody's autopilot will achieve full autonomy in the near future. Full autonomy actually meaning, you could rip the steering wheel out of the car and have it drive through any city you wish instead of "it drives through grid streets in American suburbs correctly like, 95% of the time" The entire current approach has no correctness guarantees, ML systems are horrible at dealing with tail-risk, there's a human communic…

Where do you think we are in fully autonomous planes. Curious if that problem is easier or harder than cars.

Planes have centralized Air Traffic Control that dictates every move from take off until landing of all planes within their zone. The planes only have to follow the ATC orders and not worry about other planes except for very rare emergencies. Even in those, ATC usually gives them a large block away from other planes to sort things out.

Cars in comparison can start at any moment, from any location and want to go anywhere they like without knowing what other cars are doing, or -worse- the road conditions (potholes, ice etc).

Putting blame is also easier, because legally all pilots agree to be recorded while flying since they're doing business. It'll be much harder I guess to allow recording inside cars.

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#29
post #14

... says Google. But this does ring true, and the come-to-Jesus moment on Tesla’s valuation will be when people realize this is the case. If they had a legitimate shot at being the first true players in self-driving, their valuation (which currently prices them on par with something like the sum of the top three automakers...) isn’t insane. But if it really is just lane-keep assist with intelligent cruise control, I’…

The problem with gradually going from drivers assistance to self driving is there will be some period, possibly a very long period, where the cars almost never need intervention but aren't safe enough to actually not need it. There will be a lot of accidents if it's released widely during this period (yes much more than human driver accidents. aside: there seem to be a lot of Tesla fans who think humans are much wors…

> yes much more than human driver accidents.

What are you basing this on? You can just say 'despite what Tesla fans believe' as an argument. One datapoint from google 10 years ago is not really convincing.

Specially as car also gets better at measuring human attention. CommaAI pilot is already doing quite well on that. Tesla is working on it internally as well.

And also, we can do things like assess the situation and adjust necessary attention. If you are by yourself driving threw the desert, you can relax the condition. If you are in a city the car keeps you honest.

That this will clearly cause more accidents then human by themselves is not at all clear.

Re: Tesla’s autopilot won’t achieve full autonomy, Waymo CEO says

#30

... says Google. But this does ring true, and the come-to-Jesus moment on Tesla’s valuation will be when people realize this is the case. If they had a legitimate shot at being the first true players in self-driving, their valuation (which currently prices them on par with something like the sum of the top three automakers...) isn’t insane. But if it really is just lane-keep assist with intelligent cruise control, I’…

It doesn't 'ring true' to me. Tesla might be far a way, but closer then the others. Specially when we are talking about 'as an actual business'.

Waymo and co are simply having a gigantic money burning party and will continue.

Tesla can work on this and support all their efforts as a value at to the current products.

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