Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla AI Day [video]

livestream.tesla.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 187 posts

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#61

Post by mandeepj »

doctoboggan wrote: post #37
tru3_power wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was their reasoning for not using Lidar?

I think originally it was because of the cost of the equipment. Elon and team saw how expensive lidar was and thought they needed to be able to solve the problem without it. However lidar has dropped drastically in price, so at this point I think they aren't using it just for ego reasons (i.e., we claimed it was possible to get self driving without lidar in the past, so we have to continue down that path)

> so at this point I think they aren't using it just for ego reasons

If their engineering is driven by ego (most of us think - it is) then - are they really engineers? We all know it’s coming from Top - Elon, in this case.

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#62

Post by MontyCarloHall »

notdonspaulding wrote: post #53
ajross wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand why people are downvoting this. This is the fundamental truth about safety automation like this. We don't need a perfect system to get huge gains here. Humans are really bad at driving, frankly. The bar here is very low.

I think you're right that the bar of "average human on the road's driving skills" is very low. However, I think one of the reasons there's such an inherent distrust of Tesla's FSD is that when it fails, it fails in scenarios in which people can easily see themselves succeeding. Say, on average, human drivers crash into barricades once out of every 500,000 miles driven. And say Tesla's FSD can beat that number by cras…

> Because human-caused accidents are not uniformly distributed among the driving population.

This is such a great point. Controlling for driving circumstances (e.g. weather, location, etc.), human caused accidents are not uniformly distributed across the population, but machine caused accidents are.

This, in my mind, is the fundamental reason people are distrustful of self-driving cars. Everyone thinks they’re far better than the median driver, even if this is mathematically impossible.

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#63

Post by panick21 »

doctoboggan wrote: post #37
tru3_power wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was their reasoning for not using Lidar?

I think originally it was because of the cost of the equipment. Elon and team saw how expensive lidar was and thought they needed to be able to solve the problem without it. However lidar has dropped drastically in price, so at this point I think they aren't using it just for ego reasons (i.e., we claimed it was possible to get self driving without lidar in the past, so we have to continue down that path)

Lidar might have dropped in price, but please show me the Lidar that can produce that quality output, is incredibly cheap, easy to manufacture and integrate into the car and available millions of time by next year.

And it would be great if it something that almost never broke as things that move a lot tend to. As far as I know static lidar are nowhere near as good.

Then if the difference in quality is not actually that great, doing the development effort once will scale to millions of cars the next few years. So we are literally talking many, many years of millions of lidars produced and integrated (and not replacing other sensors) to maybe have a slightly better outcome.

However that depends on your sensor fusion and how the lidar handles weather conditions and other complexities.

But I am sure its all ego.

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#64

Post by tw04 »

tru3_power wrote: post #34
ModernMech wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is exactly what LIDAR is for. This is the reason every single team in the 2007 DARPA Urban challenge that finished the race was equipped with a Velodyne laser. We knew it was a critical enabling technology 14 years ago, and it baffles me Tesla is eschewing it. Tesla's lack of this technology is the main reason I feel they will never achieve what they claim to without a huge breakthrough in AI.

What was their reasoning for not using Lidar?

I for the life of me cannot find the quote, but at some point I believe he said that if humans can judge distance/drive with nothing but vision, cars/computers will be able to as well.

It was around the time he made the comment that anyone using lidar is doomed, which is much easier to dig up as it was a headline everywhere:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/elon-musk-says-driverle...

Hoping someone else has the link to the discussion of humans using nothing but vision, my google-fu is lacking this evening.

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#65

Post by joshuamorton »

panick21 wrote: post #63
doctoboggan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think originally it was because of the cost of the equipment. Elon and team saw how expensive lidar was and thought they needed to be able to solve the problem without it. However lidar has dropped drastically in price, so at this point I think they aren't using it just for ego reasons (i.e., we claimed it was possible to get self driving without lidar in the past, so we have to continue down that path)

Lidar might have dropped in price, but please show me the Lidar that can produce that quality output, is incredibly cheap, easy to manufacture and integrate into the car and available millions of time by next year. And it would be great if it something that almost never broke as things that move a lot tend to. As far as I know static lidar are nowhere near as good. Then if the difference in quality is not actually th…

> And it would be great if it something that almost never broke as things that move a lot tend to. As far as I know static lidar are nowhere near as good.

Keep in mind you're saying this about something that attaches to a car, which already has dozens or hundreds of parts that rotate at hundreds or thousands of RPM.

> Then if the difference in quality is not actually that great, doing the development effort once will scale to millions of cars the next few years

The adage "do things that don't scale" comes to mind. If your options are "have tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles" or "have none", I'm not sure how the second is better. And we know that hundreds of thousands or even millions of lidar units are being produced (cruise and waymo and co have multiple units per vehicle and collectively hundreds of thousands of vehicles).

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#66

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #46
TheJoeMan wrote: post #31

I might be completely wrong here, but hasn’t their collision incidents often been with weird things in the road such as sideways 18 wheelers and yellow lines heading into barricades? They’ve put lots of effort into tracking some pedestrian waaaaay over on the side passing behind trees, and that is really really impressive. But it seems to me the only reason it doesn’t hit a car in front on the road is because the neu…

> I would like to see some system that also doesn’t collide into any sort of random object directly in front. The flip side of this is false positives: you don’t want a car slamming on the brakes because of a plastic shopping bag or other soft piece of trash lying in the road. This is a hard problem, regardless of technology employed. On the other hand, you need the car to distinguish a mattress lying in the road fro…

> Because for whatever reason (hubris?) Tesla insists on eschewing LIDAR/RADAR for 100% camera based systems.

It's a retrofit problem. The moment you admit that you need LIDAR/RADAR, every Tesla on the road loses value unless you're willing to retrofit them all.

Comma.ai has sidetracked this issue by basically using the built-in sensors on the vehicles, and there's rumors of a camera-only version for those without radar coming in the future. This would allow any car that has fly by wire with steering control to use it for "level 2 autonomy"

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#67

Post by nightski »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #62
notdonspaulding wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right that the bar of "average human on the road's driving skills" is very low. However, I think one of the reasons there's such an inherent distrust of Tesla's FSD is that when it fails, it fails in scenarios in which people can easily see themselves succeeding. Say, on average, human drivers crash into barricades once out of every 500,000 miles driven. And say Tesla's FSD can beat that number by cras…

> Because human-caused accidents are not uniformly distributed among the driving population. This is such a great point. Controlling for driving circumstances (e.g. weather, location, etc.), human caused accidents are not uniformly distributed across the population, but machine caused accidents are. This, in my mind, is the fundamental reason people are distrustful of self-driving cars. Everyone thinks they’re far be…

It's not just about skill. A lot of accidents are under the influence. That's a choice. While you can't control what other drivers are doing (and neither can the Tesla), you can at least significantly increase your odds of safety by some simple choices such as this.

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#68

Post by ajross »

notdonspaulding wrote: post #53
ajross wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand why people are downvoting this. This is the fundamental truth about safety automation like this. We don't need a perfect system to get huge gains here. Humans are really bad at driving, frankly. The bar here is very low.

I think you're right that the bar of "average human on the road's driving skills" is very low. However, I think one of the reasons there's such an inherent distrust of Tesla's FSD is that when it fails, it fails in scenarios in which people can easily see themselves succeeding. Say, on average, human drivers crash into barricades once out of every 500,000 miles driven. And say Tesla's FSD can beat that number by cras…

> My example is contrived.

Pretty much. I think if you're going to make an argument like "accidents by teenagers, senior citizens and drunks don't matter" you need to put some numbers behind that.

I mean, if you had a teenager or a family member with a substance problem, would you feel safer with them in a Tesla? If so, then I really don't think I understand your point.

Basically you're just saying that you, personally, as a young single man, feel like you're much better at driving than the median driver. So you want a car that is significantly better than even the median before you will "feel safe".

Alternate framing: it doesn't matter how safe you think your driving is, you're still sharing the road with grandparents. And you (if you're being rational about it) want them in a Tesla.

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#69

Post by koalafied »

I find it amusing (and maybe even ironic?) that tools and methods (GPUs and game engines, etc.) whose development was mainly driven by gaming and entertainment (rather frivolous use cases) now find applications in a much more "serious" domain with a potential to revolutionize our lives.

Re: Tesla AI Day [video]

#70

Post by itsoktocry »

xibalba wrote: post #11

Thus far, this is all information Andrej has presented elsewhere. Edit: Wow, Ashok's section was amazing. It does seems as though their ability to simulate (on top of their fleet's data collection advantage) could allow them to rapidly accelerate toward true FSD. I really like that they capture real world failures and simulate many realizations of them.

>could allow them to rapidly accelerate toward true FSD

Every year a little BS is added, and the faithful believe this. There is zero evidence they collect the data they claim to.

Post reply on HN