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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

#351

Post by bergenty »

oblio wrote: post #128
Lutger wrote: post #106

Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.

I'll be blunt about this. Most of this research is funded in the US and the hyper individualistic Americans as a group don't believe in public transport.

Yes, as a hyper individualistic American fuck public transport. I don’t want to travel with other people, I don’t want to live in dense cities and I don’t want to go to like the 10 places with public transport. I love national parks, camping, hiking, road-tripping etc.

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

#352

Post by bergenty »

amelius wrote: post #126
sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #16

So? Okay, we're not there yet with autonomous vehicles, and have spend tons of money on it. But the tech we have now didn't exist a decade ago. Give it another decade.

Perhaps we should pour more money in adapting the infrastructure to these cars, so they can become more like a train in some sense. And perhaps we can design city centers to be car free.

That’s way too expensive on the order of trillions of dollars. Not worth it and not worth the extra regulation that will come with requiring new roads to support them.

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

#353

Post by bastawhiz »

oceanplexian wrote: post #334
bastawhiz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious why you think Tesla is ahead compared to Waymo and Cruise. Autopilot struggles in my car on some fairly boring roads, while Waymo and Cruise are both operating real taxi services in vehicles without drivers. I can understand the argument that Tesla has lots of data from real world driving. But Google also has fleets of cars mapping out every road in the world.

They’re operating Taxi services in San Francisco. A city that doesn’t experience any real-world weather, with an area of like 50 square miles where speeds generally never exceed 25MPH. They also have humans watching cameras that take over when the self driving breaks down. It’s a completely different problem space, like claiming someone built a train and therefore they can easily build self driving cars since they ar…

Yes, but you're choosing only one metric to evaluate on. Waymo/Cruise are level 4+. Anecdotally (does anyone have comparable data?), they also have a much lower accident rate. Solving a problem partially for all conditions and areas rather than ~completely for a specific but large area and set of conditions doesn't seem like it puts you meaningfully ahead.

Edit: and surely Waymo/Cruise could launch everywhere with performance that's lower than their current launch cities, but they choose not to. I don't think there's any compelling reason to assume their tech doesn't work outside of SF or Arizona or wherever, they just don't want to be in the news for their cars plowing someone into a highway divider or running over a pedestrian.

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

#354

Post by bastawhiz »

cptskippy wrote: post #346
teyc wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most self-driving is about avoiding collissions, and signalling intent, especially when streets are narrow and there's merging or shared use. The physics of cars, people, bikes and kids around roads are well understood (acceleration, velocity). This can be simulated, and a game engine can generate data for virtual sensors to be trained. There's no reason to require time on the road.

But you'll never be able to come up with all of the possible scenarios to simulate. What Tesla has demonstrated is creating virtual scenarios where they can dynamic adjust all factors (light, weather, traffic, etc) and base them off real world situations they've encountered where their Model failed.

Maybe not manually, but surely you could develop an adversarial ML model that quickly and concurrently tests scenarios.

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

#355

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

binarymax wrote: post #325
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument to this is that since humans reach acceptable safety levels with vision only, it must be possible to do self driving with vision only. That said, augmenting vision with other methods does seem like a no brainer for better performance.

We have a lot more signal than vision only. For example audio, the “feel of the road”, like feedback on the steering wheel and traction that we physically experience. Most of all we have actual intelligence and reasoning - not just pattern recognition.

Feel of the road is easy enough to get with the traction control hardware that most modern cars have.

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

#356

Post by bastawhiz »

Salgat wrote: post #305
bastawhiz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious why you think Tesla is ahead compared to Waymo and Cruise. Autopilot struggles in my car on some fairly boring roads, while Waymo and Cruise are both operating real taxi services in vehicles without drivers. I can understand the argument that Tesla has lots of data from real world driving. But Google also has fleets of cars mapping out every road in the world.

Aren't Waymo and Cruise constrained to specially tailored cities? Autonomous driving that can be activated literally anywhere in the country is far more impressive, even if it has cases where it doesn't perform as well.

I have a double friends with FSD that rarely use it because it "scares [them]" by occasionally making dangerous decisions. Surely Waymo or Cruise could launch anywhere, but they make the conscious choice not to so they avoid this exact problem.

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

#357

Post by onedognight »

phi-y wrote: post #349
oceanplexian wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not though. As of today I can’t buy a production car with Cruise. You don’t get points for building something that’s theoretically superior but not an actual product. It’s the same story with companies like Apple that wipe the floor of wannabe hardware companies with theoretically better specs. Like Apple, Tesla actually ships.

Cruise is going the uber route for their service. The robo-cars are already available in some areas

Not to the public. Or at least it’s “invite only”.

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

#358

Post by cptskippy »

bastawhiz wrote: post #354
cptskippy wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you'll never be able to come up with all of the possible scenarios to simulate. What Tesla has demonstrated is creating virtual scenarios where they can dynamic adjust all factors (light, weather, traffic, etc) and base them off real world situations they've encountered where their Model failed.

Maybe not manually, but surely you could develop an adversarial ML model that quickly and concurrently tests scenarios.

What data is that model based off? Tesla has the data based on real world failures to build that model. Does anyone else?

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

#359

Post by bastawhiz »

cptskippy wrote: post #358
bastawhiz wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not manually, but surely you could develop an adversarial ML model that quickly and concurrently tests scenarios.

What data is that model based off? Tesla has the data based on real world failures to build that model. Does anyone else?

You can't discount all the data they Waymo has collected over nearly a decade or the scenarios they've manually created. They also have the world's most complete map and spatial dataset, which could easily be extended to create a model that creates tricky roadways. Stimulating obstructions or hardware failures doesn't require very much data at all.

If you are modeling scenarios like a game engine, a "discriminator" model isn't necessary: you just check whether a simulation doesn't result in a crash.

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

#360

Post by onethought »

onethought wrote: post #256
oliveshell wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radar, ultrasonic proximity sensors, and/or LIDAR, presumably. Tesla has famously removed all radar/ultrasonic sensors from their newer cars in favor of a purely camera-based system.

But they removed them well after they showed they could accurately predict distance with vision. LiDAR doesn’t make sense as a sensor to me because it only works in good weather. Its Like a car without windscreen wipers.

Appreciate the downvote/disagreement.

But here is Karpathy explaining how vision can be used to measure distance to objects accurately[0]

Here is the fact that LiDAR doesn't work in the rain[1]: "... In heavy rain, for example, the light pulses emitted from the lidar system are partially reflected off of rain droplets which adds noise to the data, called 'echoes'."

Which logically implies you need to revert to vision, as see [0] also for why Radar is unreliable.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar

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