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Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

bloomberg.com

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Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#241

Post by cs702 »

dontreact wrote: post #232
cs702 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please keep in mind that I'm talking about FSD Beta, not the current production software, which is dozens of versions behind. Are you on Beta 10.69.2.3? If I had to articulate my reasons: * Judging by the videos available online, my perception is that many situations that were impossible for Tesla FSD Beta a year ago have become uneventful in recent weeks. Take a look at Chuck Cook's videos for example (I like the fa…

I'd sum up your points 1,2,3 as "more data". This would be a reason to think they can one day be ahead if they can take advantage of this, but not evidence that they are currently ahead. Occupancy networks: waymo has published research on this before Tesla announced this at AI day (not clear to me who got there first though https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03875v1.pdf ) Tesla's Dojo -> Waymo has TPUs to train on To me all…

> I'd sum up your points 1,2,3 as "more data". This would be a reason to think they can one day be ahead if they can take advantage of this, but not evidence that they are currently ahead.

I'd sum up those three points as "more data and more real-world, open-ended, large-scale testing by regular people." Big difference.

> Occupancy networks: waymo has published research on this before Tesla announced this at AI day (not clear to me who got there first though https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03875v1.pdf)

AFAIK, Tesla FSD Beta is the only system that has been using these DNNs for open-ended testing.

> Tesla's Dojo -> Waymo has TPUs to train on

I've trained AI models on TPUs. They're nowhere near close to 36x more efficient than Nvidia GPUs.

> I am pretty biased because as a Tesla owner I am pretty pissed off at this point at how the false positives on the system in detecting close following are stopping my safety score from getting high enough to even be able to access the product I purchased.

Oh, I get your frustration... but I also understand why Tesla is being so strict with safety scores at this point. It wouldn't be fair to blame them for that.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#242

Post by cs702 »

cypress66 wrote: post #235
cs702 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please keep in mind that I'm talking about FSD Beta, not the current production software, which is dozens of versions behind. Are you on Beta 10.69.2.3? If I had to articulate my reasons: * Judging by the videos available online, my perception is that many situations that were impossible for Tesla FSD Beta a year ago have become uneventful in recent weeks. Take a look at Chuck Cook's videos for example (I like the fa…

As someone who also likes to watch Chuck Cook, I don't think Tesla is close to waymo. Tesla fsd in its current state will either crash or do some serious fuck up if you let it unattended for a few hours or maybe less (based on the disengagements in those videos). Forget about driverless Tesla with the current fsd. Waymo has been operating driverless since 2019. I do agree that it is progressing very nicely. Imo tesla…

I've yet to see how Waymo and other self-driving systems perform in open-ended testing, outside tightly restricted, geofenced environments.

Otherwise, I agree that Tesla FSD Beta has been progressing nicely. I don't know if it will take 1, 2, or 5 years to get FSD Beta to an acceptable rate of graceful failures, but I agree it looks likely to get there before the end of the decade!

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#243

Post by CrimpCity »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #175
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues. If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.

If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to delays. This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-resea…

This is true but the gains are surprisingly limited. From Algorithmic game theory there’s the concept of “the price of anarchy” it measures the gap between cooperation (a centrally designed or coordinated solution) and competition (where each participant is independently trying to maximize the outcome for themselves). Selfish routing basically what we have now has price of 4/3. This means the greedy status quo is only 33% worse than perfect coordination.

I’ll quote from one of my favorite books Algorithms to Live By:

“It’s true that self-driving cars should reduce the number of road accidents and may be able to drive more closely together, both of which would speed up traffic. But from a congestion standpoint, the fact that the price of anarchy is only 4/3 as congested as perfect coordination means that perfectly coordinated commutes will only be 3/4 as congested as they are now.”

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#244

Post by shepherdjerred »

oblio wrote: post #156
yreg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains won't do last mile delivery.

Current trains? Not directly. But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.

We're not going to stop maintaining roads. They exist for military defense as much as they do for road trips and trucks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(Unite...

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#245

Post by Veserv »

cs702 wrote: post #242
cypress66 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who also likes to watch Chuck Cook, I don't think Tesla is close to waymo. Tesla fsd in its current state will either crash or do some serious fuck up if you let it unattended for a few hours or maybe less (based on the disengagements in those videos). Forget about driverless Tesla with the current fsd. Waymo has been operating driverless since 2019. I do agree that it is progressing very nicely. Imo tesla…

I've yet to see how Waymo and other self-driving systems perform in open-ended testing, outside tightly restricted, geofenced environments. Otherwise, I agree that Tesla FSD Beta has been progressing nicely. I don't know if it will take 1, 2, or 5 years to get FSD Beta to an acceptable rate of graceful failures, but I agree it looks likely to get there before the end of the decade!

I've yet to see Tesla FSD Beta perform in any meaningful operational environment, no matter how restricted, within a factor of 100x of Waymo or Cruise, and Waymo and Cruise are still at least a factor of 10x off of "equal to human drivers". Superiority can not be claimed if a system is unacceptably bad in all circumstances (i.e. 1,000x worse than the minimum acceptable standard for real commercial usage) and worse in every case than a comparable alternative. It only makes sense if the system is better at something other than being allowed to create unacceptably bad results in a more diverse range of circumstances.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#246

Post by lamontcg »

Keyframe wrote: post #48
batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

- 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error) - existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) - reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better react/drive) - improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24) just to name a few off top of my head

- more autonomy for disabled people / elderly

(although the risk is clearly that vehicles will transition into subscription services that cost many thousands of dollars a year and price them all out)

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#247

Post by ahahahahah »

gala8y wrote: post #11
lionkor wrote: post #2

> In fact, no one has come close to making an AV Correct me if im wrong, but Honda has done this? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35729591/honda-legend-lev... https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2021/4210304eng-legend.ht... Toyota: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-02/toyota... And Cruise: https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-... I don't really see how this all qualifies as "…

> I don't really see how this all qualifies as "not close to AV", when really, it looks quite viable (with some already driving autonomously...?) Also Tesla. You can see real advancements in these videos of Tesla FSD Beta [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/AIDRIVR/videos

Tesla has nothing close to an AV. They're at about Waymo 2014 level at best.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#248

Post by EricDeb »

batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

how about robotic driving of an electric bus? I feel like that would be much more useful for cities + no driver cost.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#249

Post by Retric »

subroutine wrote: post #92
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think self driving cars have already passed the test of "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile driven. This is not definitively known. The distribution of conditions under which self driving cars operate is very different from the distribution of human driving. Self driving car miles are disproportionately on the highway, with little traffic, in perfect weather (i.e. by far the safest driving condi…

True, true. However, if I had to bet... I'd bet in a fully self driving world (using today's tech) there'd be overall far fewer fatal accidents. However there'd also be a lot of bullshit we are simply unwilling to deal with (e.g. cars going 10mph in the rain; slow motion fender benders; car unwilling to turn left; gridlock at intersections; lots of random oddities). I guess my point is that safety metrics are certain…

I think that’s underestimating just how bad people are at driving. There is little meaningful difference for other drivers from a bunch of self driving cars suddenly blocking traffic and an actual traffic accident.

People aren’t going to trust cars to safely do level 5 if they can’t do level 4 99.999% of the time. So sure there will be occasional stories of i95 blocked for 3 hours due to software bug, but how is that different from a major accident that occurs regularly?

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#250

Post by gremlinsinc »

andrepd wrote: post #79
case0x00 wrote: post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big, inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious space. Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities which are designed around cars are terrible . This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely . Focusin…

Personally, I think while probably too futuristic large drones that are autonomous and deliver people would be safer. Its arguably easier to avoid objects when you can dodge in 360 degrees of direction.

It's also easier to avoid pedestrians as most can't fly.

It also could save on gas and energy as you can go directly as a bird flies to your destination instead of taking 20 minutes it takes 3.

Of course this would be a huge infrastructure ordeal as well probably and require a damn good system as you don't want vehicles landing on houses all over the place, but it'd be amazing for people with long commutes.

You could probably have airbuses that pick up like 30 people say in a small town and fly them to the city to be delivered individually by smaller vehicles locally. What took 45 minutes, now maybe takes 15.

These would be better if maybe electric with gas as an emergency backup system, and then just have good batteries and solar power fuel most trips.

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