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Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

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Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#351

Post by filoleg »

rootusrootus wrote: post #149
judge2020 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a human identify obstacles, VRUs [0], and other cars? 0: vulnerable road users, eg pedestrians and bicyclists

> How does a human identify With the most complex, context-aware, intuitive computer in existence. In addition to eyeballs that are dramatically more capable than any camera Tesla is using.

Not going to comment on the overall lidar vs. pure camera approaches, but I don't think human eyeballs are more capable than a full 360-view array of cameras looking at everything (including blindspots) at once. For once, human eyeballs cannot see in full 360 or view the environment from outside of the car cabin (aka unrestricted by pillars and other things that obstruct the field of view from inside the cabin).

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#352

Post by astrange »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #249
bduerst wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are large, depreciating assets that spend the vast majority of their product lifecycle doing nothing. Conversely, metropolitan areas have to dedicate up to half their available space to empty blacktop storing these unused assets that sit around doing nothing. The sooner we solve on-demand transportation at scale without requiring a human driver the sooner we can move away from this colossal degree of waste.

All this tech we have is large, depreciating assets yet it still keeps happening. Humans are a large depreciating asset to the elite, lets hope they don't get tired of us anytime soon and replace us with AI and robotic servants...

That's an Ayn Rand novel, not real life; if you somehow had all the money in the country and fired everyone (i.e. stopped trading with them) then by definition you're not rich because the ability to trade with people is what being rich is.

Instead you've created two economies, one with just you and one with all of them, and the other one's better because it has more people.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#353

Post by Closi »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #312
petilon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on your incredible accomplishment! Thanks for doing this the responsible way. Tesla's approach does not inspire confidence. Starting at the high end, with expensive, reliable tech and slowly bringing the costs (and bulkiness of the equipment) down is the right approach!

In my experience, expensive doesn’t necessarily mean more reliable, it could just mean higher fidelity, higher resolution (and possibly less reliable due to the utilization of parts ‘less’ produced on the global supply chain), etc. This improved resolution don’t necessarily help an AI grok the situation in real time with >20 Hz response time though.

I think the overall sentiment is more the "let's avoid premature optimisation" rather than "let's spend the most money".

If you have pre-sold a 'self driving' capability which you have guaranteed to be backwards compatible on cars you have already sold, then you are effectively cutting out Lidar as an option unless you are going to go back to all those cars and screw it on.

And considering that self-driving isn't solved yet, it seems like a bold move to define both your processing power and your sensing hardware in a way which makes it very difficult to (commercially) change.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#354

Post by astrange »

julienb_sea wrote: post #261
mlindner wrote: post #163

I'm not interested in cars I can't own. This idea that we'll turn cars into some kind of service and convert roads into places filled with company-owned vehicles is completely foreign. At that point it'd be cheaper to have self-driving buses and subways. I can only think this viewpoint comes from people who have only ever lived in cities where car ownership is inconvenient given the lack of personal garages. At the m…

Buses and subways cannot operate door to door. That is a fundamental service restriction which will always create a need for personal transit. People with accessibility needs, safety concerns or timing restrictions create a legitimate and important market for door-to-door personal transportation. Buses are also inherently less efficient outside of peak operating hours. Why should we operate a fleet of million-dollar,…

You should visit Tokyo when they let you back in. If your city lets you get a car up to every door, it's not dense enough.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#355

Post by astrange »

soperj wrote: post #145
asdff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you haven't ridden a cab in the last 10 years, but like any other major industry these days, they do have an app you can use. You can call one up immediately like an uber or schedule it in advance like a traditional cab, it gives you a fixed price up front and a set route, tip can be included in the app how you like. In my experience taking a cab like this is better than ubering to the airport since its the sam…

You clearly haven't taken a cab lately in a place without Uber or the like.

Fine in the UK. I assume yellow cabs in SF are still just as scammy as ever, since that's basically the reason Uber was started.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#356

Post by astrange »

gpas wrote: post #308
more_corn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People own cars for convenience. In the US public transit is impossible. A self driving service can be as convenient or even more convenient compared to owning a car. (No registration, oil change, insurance, fueling, parking, maintenance chores) I’m a car guy and I see the appeal.

> In the US public transit is impossible No sarcasm. Why it's impossible to have public transit like every other country in the world but it's possible to pour tons of money on driverless cars development?

The suburban land use pattern doesn't admit good transit because not enough people live close to the stations.

Also, we have bad combinations of when to make things public/private - the US actually has much more public services than many other countries (other places do have privatized mail, transit, etc) but then doesn't fund them. If this was Japan all the good stores would be in the train station and would fund the operations.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#357

Post by astrange »

toss1 wrote: post #345
astrange wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theranos didn't use the normal set of VCs because they all thought it was a scam; they raised from some random rich people who weren't professional tech VCs instead. It's unfortunate the only thing she was convicted for was defrauding them, since being accredited investors they should be able to live with that. As for Elon, he's currently doing a bad boy anti-government bit in an attempt to make Tesla "electric cars…

>> It's unfortunate the only thing she was convicted for was defrauding them, since being accredited investors they should be able to live with that. NO. Investors are supposed to be able to live with all the usual risks of technology, execution, marketplace dynamics, etc. They are NOT supposed to be OK with deliberate fraud. If you invest at Early_Round when the tech looks promising, but then it fails to develop, CE…

If you're selling a pump and dump like crypto or Uber, you want the CEO to lie to you because it shows he's good at lying! Then you all go out and lie with him, then Softbank gives you a billion dollars for no reason.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#358

Post by astrange »

colinmhayes wrote: post #179
asdff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have overhead to manage your fleet of self driving cars. They aren't self repairing, self fueling, and self cleaning yet.

Cheaper than having individuals manage their own cars.

The Uber trick is that people don't understand how much it costs to own a car, so riders get to extract money from overinvested drivers.

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#359

Post by idontwantthis »

LegitShady wrote: post #205
walrus01 wrote: post #8

Based on this image: https://images.ctfassets.net/95kuvdv8zn1v/6h1C7lPC79OLOlddEE... They and their VC backers are clearly betting on the concept that radars + lidar + imaging will be the ultimate successful solution in full self driving cars, as a completely opposite design and engineering philosophy from Tesla attempting to do "full self driving" with camera sensors and categorical rejection of lidar. It is interes…

In Lex fridmans interview with George Hotz, hots talks about why he thinks radar AI is a non starter and predicted that even though Tesla was still adamant about using their radar, they would eventually realize they only needed cameras. Hotz is the founder of comma.ai which is doing open source (I think?) Company.

Didn’t Hotz publicly give up on self driving and say driver assistance is all that will ever be possible?

Re: Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco

#360

Post by jowday »

gonehome wrote: post #349
jowday wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth of it is that it’s just not possible (with currently existing technology/ML architectures) to create a truly autonomous taxi without HD maps. Everyone in the robotaxi industry knows this - even Tesla builds HD maps, they just don’t call them that.

My knowledge only comes from Karpathy's talks about this (which are great, worth watching if you haven't seen them). I found his and Tesla's arguments convincing for the general case. That doesn't mean that the narrow cases aren't super cool or valuable (I signed up for this Cruise thing in SF). I just think that if the software is unable to make decisions based on visual data alone without up to date high resolution…

> I just think that if the software is unable to make decisions based on visual data alone without up to date high resolution maps it'll never achieve true FSD in the general case (not geo locked). You'll end up trapped in a local max otherwise because there are just too many conditions in the real world that vary.

My contention is that there’s no way to actually solve for the general case with currently existing technology. The amount of novelty in the real world is too great for any system to account for it without disambiguating via HD maps or remote support.

>You have to solve the vision problem.

This isn’t a vision problem specifically - even if you had LIDAR and high resolution imaging radar and 8 A100s on every Tesla, “true generalized self driving” wouldn’t be achievable without HD maps with our current understanding of Machine Learning.

>My understanding was that Tesla did not rely on the same stuff that Waymo and Cruise require.

Tesla maps individual traffic light elements, stop signs, and lane markings, but will attempt to drive even if the area isn’t mapped.

Disparities in FSD performance in different areas is largely attributable to some areas being better mapped than others - the mapping data has a huge effect on its performance. There are key elements of the driving task (including recognizing and reacting to every single type of sign other than a stop sign) that FSD can’t do and relies entirely on maps for.

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