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Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

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Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#51

tldr: Tesla uses vision alone, and has dropped radar and the other sensor. He makes a very decent argument why. (Surprisingly, he basically ignores night driving.)

Not a fan of TSLA, but isn't night driving just a special case of daytime driving if you use IR and/or hyperspectral cameras?

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#52

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally availa…

My prediction is that Tesla will eventually use LIDAR despite whatever they are saying now.

Right now their profit model is selling cars, not autonomy, so everything is optimized for that, including the decision to not use LIDAR.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#53
post #52

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally availa…

My prediction is that Tesla will eventually use LIDAR despite whatever they are saying now. Right now their profit model is selling cars, not autonomy, so everything is optimized for that, including the decision to not use LIDAR.

lol what? did you watch the video at all

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#54
post #44

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally availa…

You get sparse point cloud from LIDAR sensors, not accurate 3D maps. This is the main reason why some people think LIDAR may not work well (mostly, only comma.ai and Tesla folks). Vision can also get you 3D maps, either in active manner (IR floodlight or structured lighting) or not. I will reserve my judgement until see more from either side.

LIDAR is valuable as a safety feature, i.e. it can (unlike radars or cameras) reliably see (at least in clear weather) if there's anything in the car's path warranting evasion/braking maneuvers. In particular it's important that the LIDAR is dumb, i.e. its failure mores are predictable

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#55
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is that Tesla will eventually use LIDAR despite whatever they are saying now. Right now their profit model is selling cars, not autonomy, so everything is optimized for that, including the decision to not use LIDAR.

lol what? did you watch the video at all

Well yes, but I think they'll be singing a different tune in 5 years, and even more so when more Tesla cars actually start driving in weather conditions less favorable than Palo Alto and Austin.

At some point when LIDAR is cheap enough there is no reason for Elon Musk to not give in and use them. Right now he's constraining the problem to the cost of the car.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re betting that they can use a massive feedback loop to train a set of neural networks to the point where they are as accurate as LiDAR without actually firing any lasers. Even if you believe this goal is possible to achieve at some point in the future, I think the argument falls apart when you consider that it will take years, probably decades, for a pure vision approach to catch up to where Waymo is today in t…

> I think the argument falls apart when you consider that it will take years, probably decades, for a pure vision approach to catch up to where Waymo is today in terms of safety. (They have cameras too.) On what set of metrics do you think Waymo is safer? IMO it's too early to compare and cherry-picked proofs both from Waymo and Tesla are not really representative.

For starters, Waymo reported 1 disengagement per 29,944 miles driven in 2020 to the California DMV [1], while in the talk, Karpathy implies that a Tesla being able to drive around the SF area for 2 hours without a disengagement is unusual. Note that Tesla didn't file a disengagement report because they didn't do any autonomous testing on public roads in California in 2020.

There are issues with reading too much into disengagements, but there certainly seems to be a large difference here.

[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2021/02/09/2020-disen...

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#57
post #46

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally availa…

I predict the opposite. Tesla sold half a million cars last year and will sell nearly one million this year. The data they have access to is increasing by orders of magnitude. I bet there is a point, let's say 20 million cars total, where they can pull so much high quality data that they will be able to surpass lidar capabilities for the purposes of self driving. The lidar/no lidar discussion is a fun one because peo…

[deleted]

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#58
post #44

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally availa…

You get sparse point cloud from LIDAR sensors, not accurate 3D maps. This is the main reason why some people think LIDAR may not work well (mostly, only comma.ai and Tesla folks). Vision can also get you 3D maps, either in active manner (IR floodlight or structured lighting) or not. I will reserve my judgement until see more from either side.

> You get sparse point cloud from LIDAR sensors

Take a look at how dense the point cloud from Waymo's 5th gen LIDAR is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COgEQuqTAug&t=11599s. They just talked about this a few days ago.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#59
post #44

Tesla's decision not to use the LIDAR as a safety feature (i.e. having reliable high-resolution data about things the car can collide with) is so incredibly indefensible, since solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence Prediction: Tesla will be the last of all major auto manufacturers to get to L5 autonomy. Time interval between when Tesla L5 FSD is finally availa…

You get sparse point cloud from LIDAR sensors, not accurate 3D maps. This is the main reason why some people think LIDAR may not work well (mostly, only comma.ai and Tesla folks). Vision can also get you 3D maps, either in active manner (IR floodlight or structured lighting) or not. I will reserve my judgement until see more from either side.

This framing is a common error in the debate. It's not cameras or lidar, it's cameras or cameras + lidar + radar. Nobody is driving on lidar alone. Many others actually have more cameras and are doing substantially more vision than Tesla is, they're just fusing lidar and radar perception with their vision pipeline. It gives you a more robust view of the world than using a single sensor modality.

Re: Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re betting that they can use a massive feedback loop to train a set of neural networks to the point where they are as accurate as LiDAR without actually firing any lasers. Even if you believe this goal is possible to achieve at some point in the future, I think the argument falls apart when you consider that it will take years, probably decades, for a pure vision approach to catch up to where Waymo is today in t…

I understand why they made the "no-LIDAR" bet early when the LIDARs were completely unpractical for a production consumer car However, nowadays it starts to look that 100% reliable depth estimation from cameras might actually require a human-level AI to work and also solid-state LIDAR technology is becoming cheap enough and integrateable into normal cars, but Tesla can't really change their stance on this without adm…

Is it something that can be retrofitted on existing models?
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