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I have formally accepted the CEO job at Cruise once again

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

#61

Post by jowday »

judge2020 wrote: post #52
toomuchtodo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To add, they also often have Lidar vehicles roaming around their Fremont factory and design center in Hawthorne, so they're definitely not ruling out any specific technology if it happens to provide measurable improvements at some time.

It’s very likely those LIDAR vehicles are used to gather ground truth to train depth models or calibrate sensors.

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

#62

Post by judge2020 »

jowday wrote: post #54
8ytecoder wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tesla isn’t focused on robotaxis - they’re focused on trying to sell a premium ADAS feature their CEO over promised half a decade ago. Whcih is necessarily designed very differently from a robotaxi. It doesn’t make sense to try to force a stack built for robotaxis into a consumer ADAS car because you’d have to fundamentally rewrite the stack anyways. This is why GM had its own ADAS team while Cruise focused on robota…

That's exactly what OP is saying - GM is focusing on 'compete with Tesla' rather than pushing for progress/allowing Cruise to progress the technology on their own schedule.

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

#63

Post by XCSme »

jeffbee wrote: post #37
XCSme wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am asking mostly because the image captchas are starting to be really tough for humans, but ML can easily detect cars, boats and road signs.

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

#64

Post by jklinger410 »

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…

> You can safely assume most of the major players have thought through ideas like this and abandoned them for good reasons

I'd LOVE to hear the reasons why this system won't work. If it is something other than all the big car companies refuse play nice with each other I will be SHOCKED.

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

#65

Post by jowday »

judge2020 wrote: post #48
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…

The thing is that I can't find any examples of Tesla's vision only system in FSD Beta not detecting any objects - all the failures are on the 'driving AI' side, ie. it makes the bad decision to try to turn right into a cyclist despite the cyclist being displayed on the center screen[0]. 0: https://twitter.com/WarrenJWells/status/1491487543455465472?...

There are tons of examples of objects flickering in and out of existence, not being detected, warping in weird ways. This is one of the most recent tweets from a prominent Tesla reverse engineer with plenty of examples.

https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1496598013590097923

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

#66

Post by XCSme »

jowday wrote: post #40
XCSme wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In that case, LIDAR won't give that deeper scene understanding and abstract reasoning, right? It will be some extra input data to the ML model.

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

#67

Post by jowday »

judge2020 wrote: post #62
jowday wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla isn’t focused on robotaxis - they’re focused on trying to sell a premium ADAS feature their CEO over promised half a decade ago. Whcih is necessarily designed very differently from a robotaxi. It doesn’t make sense to try to force a stack built for robotaxis into a consumer ADAS car because you’d have to fundamentally rewrite the stack anyways. This is why GM had its own ADAS team while Cruise focused on robota…

That's exactly what OP is saying - GM is focusing on 'compete with Tesla' rather than pushing for progress/allowing Cruise to progress the technology on their own schedule.

And I’m saying it doesn’t make sense to do that with Cruise’s stack.

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

#68

Post by silentsea90 »

Huge fan of Kyle and the Cruise team. I remember covering Cruise in a class assignment back in 2014, and was very skeptical of the idea of selling self driving kits to existing car owners. Ever since, they've gotten acquired (or something) and are holding up their own against behemoths in the space. Cruise's reviews on Blind are pretty bad, something that keeps me away from joining them as an employee, but I suppose chaos and uncertainty is the price one pays for the ambition to achieve something as wild.

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

#69

Post by unfocussed_mike »

gowld wrote: post #17
mandeepj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> abruptly left Cruise There’s more to it. The prior CEO wanted an IPO for Cruise but the GM CEO did not. So, you know how it turned out Edit -> changed gm to GM (General Motors, parent co. of Cruise) Edit 2 -> grammar correction

What's a "gm CEO" ?

Same as an ordinary CEO but with a gene from fish oil for extra lustre?

(I'm just burning karma for jokes again because it is late)

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

#70

Post by jowday »

XCSme wrote: post #66
jowday wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In that case, LIDAR won't give that deeper scene understanding and abstract reasoning, right? It will be some extra input data to the ML model.

The sort of abstract reasoning I’m talking about is beyond the capabilities of any ML model that will run onboard a car - the “abstract reasoning” problem in AVs right now is solved primarily through HD mapping and remote assistance.

LIDAR is useful for a ton of other reasons - ground truth depth, high visibility at night, great for localization - and can detect if something’s an obstacle or not without having seen it before (but false positives can be an issue).

Broadly speaking, people who focus on Camera vs LiDAR are missing the mark and don’t understand that the real difference between big AV players and consumer cars is HD maps and remote support.

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