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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]

#141
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Many others actually have more cameras and are doing substantially more vision than Tesla

This is actually my main criticism of Tesla's approach. They don't seem to have enough cameras to do the job well, and its showing in a lot of actual system limitations.

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

#142
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He showed how poorly their outdated radar performed. The rest of the industry uses newer, vastly superior radars.

What radar did Tesla use? What does the rest of the industry use?

They are using Continental 2D radars from 2014. The rest of the SDC industry uses what is called 4D high resolution imaging radars. That's why Teslas have poor performance like phantom braking under bridges.

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

#143
post #9

It's interesting that an academic conference now feels like a marketing op for industrial research labs more than anything. His claims about how accurate their vision system is and how it is exceeding other sensors is not verifiable in any way to the public. Given how well qualified he is I am sure he is not wrong! Andrej is brilliant. But this is an academic conference right? This isn't open science, it's a discussi…

The talk wasn't part of the main conference but it was part of a workshop, which was just one out of tons of workshops.

http://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/workshops-schedule

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

#144
post #138

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…

> solving the last 1% of this using only vision likely requires a general artificial intelligence That is likely close to true with lidar as well. See also some of Waymo's recent struggles in unexpected construction zones. Maybe lidar helps in getting there, but I'm afraid they all hit a pretty tough ceiling without this.

> That is likely close to true with lidar as well. See also some of Waymo's recent struggles in unexpected construction zones.

That example has nothing to do with lidar, but with planning. The car was able to detect the construction zone just fine.

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

#145
post #133
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk and Karpathy have been dead wrong about LIDAR for years. Right, because all those companies that use LIDAR are making billions driving people around. Oh, wait, actually they are burning 100 of millions every year. > I think most hilarious is that both Karpathy and Musk claim the LIDAR systems are too expensive. That's literally the opposite of what Musk says about Lidar. He LITERALLY said he wouldn't use them…

>It seems really what you are saying is not that Tesla are charlatan but the whole industry is. The entire industry has an air of charlatanism. Tesla is the biggest charlatan of the bunch. The LIDAR-using ventures at least have a snowball's chance in hell. Tesla has no chance with vision alone.

I would love to know what your credentials are that you can say this with such certainty

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the arguments made in this talk is which sensor to trust when there is a disagreement. I'd love to see the scenarios where this happens with three types of sensors and the logic they use to choose the "right" one.

You can't avoid this problem by only having a single sensor modality, because you still have to decide if you trust your sensor data or not. In effect, you actually made the problem harder because you have no other information from any other sensor modalities to help understand the world around you.

In effect, they solved the disagreement problem by sticking their head in the sand and pretending their sensors are never wrong.

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

#147
post #137
post #8

I like Andrej from his PhD research days and awesome blog posts but this is a series of disasters in the making, that is until FTC steps in after more people die from “self-driving” accidents under interesting and unexpected circumstances. The whole vision vs. LIDAR stuff is a distraction as long as Tesla “AI” doesn’t have common sense. It literally doesn’t know what it’s doing, and the tail of edge cases to "fit" th…

> ANNs are fundamentally backwards looking and cannot adapt to unforeseen or even slightly unusual combination of circumstances. It will go fine for n miles and will dramatically fail at mile n+1 where a new situation requires understanding of ones surroundings, and n is arbitrary number. And humans also fail after some arbitrary number of m+1 miles. And in many cases far more catastrophically then AI.

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

#148
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have one piece of rotten meat in a perfect stew, you still have a disgusting dish. Good sensor fused with garbage in is still garbage in. That was one of the major points of the talk - the vision-only system is more accurate than the one with other modalities thrown in, even though the latter has more data. We intuit that the fusion network should just learn to ignore the bad sensor when it's unreliable, but t…

> That was one of the major points of the talk - the vision-only system is more accurate than the one with other modalities thrown in, even though the latter has more data. We intuit that the fusion network should just learn to ignore the bad sensor when it's unreliable, but this rarely happens in practice.

This makes some important assumptions, namely that Tesla built a lidar and radar perception pipelines and sensor fusion of equivalent quality to their competitors, and then decided they were unnecessary.

Given that their competitors have shown substantially better perception than Tesla, and that Tesla has a significant economic incentive to deliver autonomous driving on a sensor suite that already shipped years ago, I find that difficult to believe. Did Tesla build good enough perception to dismiss lidar and radar purely on their merits. Unlikely I think. Did an intern build a student-quality lidar pipeline that "proved" Elon's camera-first approach is the right one? More likely.

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

#149
post #124
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strawman. No one is looking to build FSD with radar sensors that have shipped on cars for 20 years now for things like adaptive cruise control. LIDAR is what vision only is compared to.

Radar is the technology that is actually shipping in millions of cars. Lidar is future tech that is not practically to deploy in millions of cars as of now. There is absolutely 0 chance they could just 'put in lidar' from now on so for what he has to do its not relevant.

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

#150
post #118
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. By all measures I've seen (including a couple of slides in the OP's video), Tesla's self-driving is far safer than human driving: the number of accidents and deaths per mile driven are something like an order of magnitude lower (i.e., around 10x safer). I mean, the machine never gets distracted, tired, sleepy, emotional, drunk, etc., so it is a LOT LESS likely to crash on boring, monotonous road…

>Tesla's self-driving is far safer than human driving: the number of accidents and deaths per mile driven are something like an order of magnitude lower (i.e., around 10x safer). Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Tesla here, is, again, being funny with the numbers. They LOVE to cite autopilot ON death statistics as being "10x safer than normal driving". What they fail to note is that Autopilot can ONLY be on while dri…

> So, Tesla autopilot stats should be compared to other comparably priced vehicles while driving on the highway ONLY.

I disagree. Autopilot driving on the highway should be compared to all human drivers driving on the highway. Otherwise you wouldn't be comparing against human performance per mile driven apples-to-apples.

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