I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again • Hacker News Board

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#31

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

I would not take Elon and Tesla at face value. While they are currently going all in on cameras, I wouldn't put it past them to 180 and decide "turns out we need new hardware, and we're going to eat the cost considering our revenue and market cap." They recently filed to test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz [1], so I wouldn't say they're married to vision only if it turns out vision only isn't going to work.

They are an engineering company, and they will attempt to engineer their way out of the wrong decision (vision only) if they have to in order to deliver.

[1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/13/tesla-millimeter-wave-radar-e...

[2] https://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry328/spry328.pdf (Page 3-4, rich point cloud data, improved velocity resolution from 60GHz sensors, looks a lot like the benefits you'd get from LIDAR)

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#32

Post by bluGill » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

My problem with cameras is as a human I'm well aware there are things that I can't see and so i rely on faith. I've driven in dense fog trusting that nobody else would be stupid enough to do the same (fortunately taillights can be seen through fog, but not many other dangers that normally are not on the road, but if so they are dead). I often drive with sub in my eyes at dawn/dusk and trust that the road is clear. I come of the top of hills and trust there is nothing on the other side where I can't see until I'm over the top and it would be too late. Backup cameras have been very useful, and take away something I would have said a few years ago.

The above is situations I know of offhand hand were my vision isn't up to the task yet I do anyway - because I don't really have other options. If other sensors can outdo me then I want them.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#33

Post by 8ytecoder » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

jowday wrote: post #25

ajross wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [integrating] Cruise's technology into consumer GM cars [is] not how Cruise/Waymo/Zoox-style robotaxis work, and any such integration would necessarily involve rewriting a huge portion of the stack. That sounds like a [citation needed] to me. Surely there are UI problems to be solved in a car with a human being in the driver's seat, but the sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's…

I work in the AV space, so I guess you’ll just have to trust me. I assume Cruise internals look very similar to the internals at other AV companies, which I think is a safe assumption. >The sensors and automation decisionmaking is going to be identical, and that's where the hard parts are. Sensors will be very different. LIDAR prices are coming down but we’re still a while off from incorporating it into consumer vehi…

But that’s not what Tesla is doing! You’re absolutely right and it’s also a safer route (for others on the road) to go with robotaxis first. This is precisely why you can’t focus too much on competitors. GM and their CEO (who seems to be really smart) is focusing on Tesla here and trying to compete with them.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#34

Post by sroussey » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

And you can just shine a Q-beam at such a car.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#35

Post by jowday » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

shrubble wrote: post #28

I have a great deal of skepticism concerning fully-autonomous cars, TBH. There are just too many corner cases around weather and sensing, etc., not to mention insurance and other regulatory hurdles. Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense wh…

> Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap.

You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons. In this case, you wouldn’t be able to rely on these external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you’d necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications and trying to deal with different standards and models and interop adds a ton of complexity.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#36

Post by siddarthd2919 » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

XCSme wrote: post #29

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

> Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? (I'm not suggesting that using LIDAR is not an improvement though).

No, not with edge cases detection. In the Lidar vs Camera context - Camera depth models have a lot of room to improve

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#37

Post by jeffbee » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

XCSme wrote: post #29

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

> Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? (I'm not suggesting that using LIDAR is not an improvement though).

LOL no, not even remotely close. ML image classifiers will decide that an otter is a bicycle with some invisible (to humans) noise injected into the chroma. And that's state-of-the-art classifiers, which Tesla does not possess.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#38

Post by martythemaniak » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

You know, I think the Vision vs LIDAR is very narrow and won't be very relevant in the long-term. If you imagine the full robotaxi stack: cars, training, simulations, back testing, data sourcing, perception, driving decisions, etc, etc, the LIDAR vs Vision concerns only one small part of the stack.

Critically, LIDAR still has to be trained in the same way cameras have to - it'll give you depth information, but you still have to make it accurate decide whether some 3D blob is a person, sign, etc. LIDAR does not help you recognize street markings, interpret signs etc.

That is the big question is: what is cheaper/faster: cheap sensors and more training, or more expensive sensors and less training. As LIDAR and training both get cheaper, it might not end up making much of a difference in the end. Companies will be successful based on how well they execute on the full stack and a slight edge in one area might not be enough to overcome problems elsewhere.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#39

Post by pm90 » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

jowday wrote: post #35

shrubble wrote: post #28

I have a great deal of skepticism concerning fully-autonomous cars, TBH. There are just too many corner cases around weather and sensing, etc., not to mention insurance and other regulatory hurdles. Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense wh…

> Personally, the idea of "a wire in the road" by which I mean something like cats-eyes in the road but with RFID tags placed every 40 feet, or some other common means maintained by the DOT that all cars can use to sense where they are, is neglected because every player in autonomous cars wants the "winner take all" method of being first, which will give them at least, a $25 billion market cap. You can safely assume…

I don't think anyone has seriously explored collaborating with DoT. If they had they would have at least talked about it.

> In this case, you wouldn’t be able to rely on these external sensors being online with 100% uptime, so you’d necessarily be forced to build the capabilities to operate without them anyways. And adding external sensors and local communications and trying to deal with different standards and models and interop adds a ton of complexity.

Well, yeah nobody said it was easy. But, it does seem like something that could work, whereas we know that fully autonomous is just not possible with the tech we have today.

Re: I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

#40

Post by jowday » Mon, Feb 28, 2022, 9:47 PM UTC

XCSme wrote: post #29

walrus01 wrote: post #26

From the last time that Cruise showed up on HN a while back, I recall I made a comment based on the photos of their test vehicles that they're clearly going all-in on LIDAR + RADAR + camera for feeding data into their autonomous onboard navigation computer. This is directly the opposite of what Tesla has mandated their engineers to do, which is to be 100% reliant upon camera systems only. Somebody at Cruise commented…

> Relying entirely on cameras only requires the full intellect of a human who can make snap judgments about what's going on in a scene Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans? (I'm not suggesting that using LIDAR is not an improvement though).

> Aren't AI models already better at image recognition than humans?

On some benchmarks, AI models are better at very well defined tasks like image classification (“label this image from a set of 8 labels you’ve seen before”) or object detection (“draw a box around all instances of class X in this image, where X is a very narrowly defined class”) They’re not even close to being able to understand unscene examples and parse out their meaning in a larger context the way humans can. (“Recognize that this object in the road is a human riding some sort of bizarre unicycle he welded himself, then predict how he’s likely to move given the structure of his custom unicycle thing”)

The bottleneck in AVs isn’t “perception” in the sense of image classification and object detection, it’s deeper scene understanding and abstract reasoning.