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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

#101

Post by Traster »

nbardy wrote: post #78
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 used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in computer vision changes everything. Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to be the k…

So is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Some guy decides a trillion dollar company should discard an entire dataset for no reason, and as a result a decade late the company can finally actually do the job, thus proving the guy ?right?

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

#102

Post by madamelic »

pm90 wrote: post #39
jowday wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 model…

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

Collabing with DoT is a terrible idea imo.

Anyone who has seen anything any DoT in America has tried to do in the last few decades should immediately know why. It will cost an astronomical amount of money along with an equal time length.

To put "wires in road", it would likely be a project on the scale of trillions and 50+ year deadline. It won't happen, it's more feasible to solve the problem of how to have smart cars on dumb roads rather than relying on bloated and corrupt DoT & contractors to do the work of making smart roads.

This isn't even to mention the likely quagmire of what happened with early railroads where the rails laid by different companies weren't compatible with each other and you had to switch to an entirely different train to continue your journey.

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

#103

Post by _kuvn »

judge2020 wrote: post #60
sroussey wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You could also draw some faint dotted white lines leading right into a concrete barrier, and pretty much every lane-keeping system will follow them.

> You could also draw some faint dotted white lines leading right into a concrete barrier

To paraphrase XKCD [0] - if you want to cause accidents, there are other failure mechanisms that'd work on humans as well

[0] https://xkcd.com/1958/

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

#104

Post by vardump »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #31
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…

"test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz [1]"

I thought that radar was inside cabin only, to detect kids, etc.?

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

#105

Post by sonofhans »

jklinger410 wrote: post #64
jowday wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Let’s assume your proposal — wires in the road to aid lane-keeping — works perfectly. What does it get us aside from lane-keeping? That’s far from the hardest problem. It doesn’t account for stopped vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, deer, or any of the other things human drivers commonly encounter and avoid without fanfare. Even if we imagine some sort of car-utopia where only AV vehicles are allowed on your perfect roads it doesn’t account for common vehicle malfunctions like blown tires.

You shouldn’t IMO scope the problem only to lane-keeping. That’s a very small part of the problem space. Solutions aimed at only that problem still leave the most important problems untouched.

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

#106

Post by toomuchtodo »

vardump wrote: post #104
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…

"test new millimeter wave radar equipment operating at 60GHz [1]" I thought that radar was inside cabin only, to detect kids, etc.?

I thought the same, but have seen multiple product sheets and marketing materials from various manufacturers of this equipment describing it being used for exterior scene building and object discrimination (with about 40 meters of range). Continental (well known for its forward looking radar for automatic emergency braking) has a similar product that operates at ~77GHz.

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

#107

Post by onethought »

jdlshore wrote: post #88
toomuchtodo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM, who owns Cruise, paid out claims for 124 deaths due to their ignition recall that they were aware of, did not disclose to regulators at the time, and had to forfeit $900 million to the United States government in 2014 [1]. Tesla's Autopilot has been attributed to 12 deaths [2]. Let they who is without engineering sin cast the first stone. Intent and risk appetite is a spectrum. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…

Classic whataboutism. GM's irresponsible behavior doesn't excuse Tesla's irresponsible behavior.

It's not whataboutism.

- Autopilot has been "on" during 12 fatal crashes. It's a level 2 driver assist so it isn't "responsible" for those deaths, the driver is. Autopilot data shows it improves safety. Could you explain the unethical part?

- The ignition recall, GM knew it was a problem, and it was. The unethical part is super clear.

These aren't equivalent at all. Actually this highlights the bad faith attacks on Tesla. There are reasonable controversial decisions to be discussed with Tesla's approach. But safety isn't one of them, they have the safest cars on the roads and the lowest crash/fatality rate.

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

#108

Post by ghostedbycruise »

reTensor wrote: post #56
rmason wrote: post #5

I'm in Michigan and I've watched the auto industry close up for a long time. I've got friends at the Big 3. GM decided it was better to put an adult in charge of Cruise. Someone they trusted and they thought had a clue on tech. Turns out it didn't work well. GM learned the hard way the founder was the best CEO of Cruise. There's a lot they do not understand about how startups and Silicon Valley work.

Kyle Vogt was removed from the CEO position in late 2018 after Cruise failed to make progress toward a number of milestones. The milestones were outlined as part of the Cruise acquisition. Dan Ammann took over and made really substantial progress. Ammann is widely considered to be the reason Cruise is where it is today. His record of success was in sharp contrast to Vogt's consistent record of failure. Unfortunately,…

what is Cruise's hiring process like atm? I'm very interested in the AV space as a new grad and have worked on a relevant project with a real vehicle, but never heard back.

Is MS the bare minimum required?

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

#109

Post by vardump »

ironman1478 wrote: post #85
nbardy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to agree with you, but I think the last 3 months in computer vision changes everything. Unstructured learning on Image+Text pairs has exploded and set STOTA on benchmark across the field. While the data coming from LIDAR may be better. There is no where near the amount of LIDAR data in the world. Images and cameras have the advantage here where internet is full of weakly labeled data that turns out to be the k…

How much of that camera data is labeled for distance measurement use cases?

Because cars (generally) move, probably most of it. You can compare successive frames and make predictions.

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

#110

Post by omeze »

reTensor wrote: post #93
technofiend wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least according to Tech Crunch it was because Ammann also failed to deliver something on Barra's agenda [1]: And while Ammann continued to push the company to expand, there were missed targets, notably the plan to launch a commercial robotaxi business in 2019. The company has spent the past two years inching toward that commercialization goal, along with the rest of the industry, which has gone through a spate of…

The failure to launch in 2019 was shortly after Ammann took over (late 2018). Ammann inherited Vogt's mess, and at that time nobody in management fully understood how bad the situation was. Ammann promptly began fixing things and we see the fruits of that today. Ammann's departure, to the best of our knowledge, is a result of a conflict with GM's CEO regarding the future of Cruise as a business. Hopefully Vogt can pr…

fully appreciate if you can't go into detail, but what changed? It seems like they'd always been working towards robotaxi-ing from a product perspective so it must have come down to execution-level stuff, no?
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