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Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

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Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#181

Post by bangaladore »

rurp wrote: post #153
bangaladore wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level and neither is the lidar. The point is overused, but humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat. I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5. Dogs jump…

That vision-only argument is marketing spin from Tesla. The biggest thing it leaves out is that humans process their vision input with a human brain, which Tesla vehicles very much do not have. If and when we create true AGI they will have a good argument, but a world where that exists will be wildly different from our current one and who knows if Tesla's tech will even be relevent anymore.

Why are you so confident that AGI, or a human brain, is necessary to be able to drive a car with only cameras?

I get annoyed with statements like this because technology changes and advances so quickly, and Tesla has made substantial technical leaps in this field of machine learning. They have the state-of-the-art vision -> voxels/depth models and are only improving.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#182

Post by directevolve »

bangaladore wrote: post #128
Workaccount2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google already has a fleet of vehicles driving around continuously taking new street view photos.

Google Maps seems to update at a frequency of 2-8 years. Maybe longer in some areas and we don't know what they do other than stitch it together. HD mapping, on the other hand, likely needs to be updated frequently and immediately when any construction occurs. It seems pretty clear that what they are doing today is nowhere near what they need to do. And again, I don't think that is possible.

I'm just speculating here, but I can envision a few ways of dealing with the cost problem in scaling an HD mapping-based robotaxi fleet:

1. Robotaxi companies might simply stand to make enough money to cover the cost of routine HD mapping. Anywhere the revenue of putting taxi services in a new city outweighs the cost of implementing the necessary updates sufficiently, won't companies do it? We could think of these companies as having similar economics to Uber, but replacing the cost of paying drivers with the cost of routine HD mapping updates.

2. Smaller towns have less frequent construction, so the update costs might be lower as you target less dense areas.

3. I could see a single company that specializes in providing routinely updated maps to a variety of fleet-operating companies. This could potentially be a utility or somehow subsidized by the government. It would also be possible for government to coordinate construction with HD mapping updates. After all, by lowering the rate of accidents and decreasing square footage devoted to cars, governments have a vested interest in seeing robotaxis replace human-owned and driven cars.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#183

Post by bangaladore »

rootusrootus wrote: post #147
bangaladore wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level and neither is the lidar. The point is overused, but humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat. I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5. Dogs jump…

> humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat Eyes which are orders of magnitude capable than the best cameras, and Teslas come with mediocre cameras, not the best. Eyes which are connected to a brain, and ML is a looooong ways from rivaling that. > That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve. Robotaxis do not need to account for things jumping out unexpectedly in front of them?

Again, another claim that a brain or AGI is required to drive a car. Does anyone have any research to cite that establishes this seemingly known fact?

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#184

Post by bangaladore »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #132
bangaladore wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Maps seems to update at a frequency of 2-8 years. Maybe longer in some areas and we don't know what they do other than stitch it together. HD mapping, on the other hand, likely needs to be updated frequently and immediately when any construction occurs. It seems pretty clear that what they are doing today is nowhere near what they need to do. And again, I don't think that is possible.

The obvious thing to do is to just have every Waymo robotaxi or car with licensed Waymo tech report in its daily mapping/obstacle data to the mothership, so you can get new changes almost immediately. I dunno if said data would be as high quality as dedicated HD mapping cars, but it's probably at least decent, given the variety of cameras and lidars every Waymo car has.

I suspect its the processing and validation, not the raw data that is difficult. At least for cities.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#185

Post by ajcp »

ra7 wrote: post #174
ajcp wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1: Airport rides are already available in Phoenix between 10PM and 6AM. 2: I have never seen a Waymo on the freeway without someone driving it (not monitored self-driving, but physically driving it). Take this with a grain of sand but it is my understanding that full self-driving on highways is still far away given the limited range of the (relatively) small sensors and the speed of travel required. That is: the sens…

I meant airport rides to the terminal at all hours of the day. Waymo is already giving driverless freeway rides to employees in Phoenix, so I don’t agree that it’s far away. It’s definitely a different challenge though.

Are they really? Only in Chandler or throughout?

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#186

Post by aetherson »

lucianbr wrote: post #72
xnx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Yes. Yes. Waymo's have been taught to handle construction and emergency signals. Waymo's can follow hand directions from a cop in the street.

Are there no freeways inside the geofence? Someone in the thread mentions that they will be adding freeways soon, so I understand it can't do those now.

There are freeways within the geofence in SF. My understanding is that Waymos will not drive on those freeways without a safety driver for now.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#187

Post by choppaface »

lucianbr wrote: post #53
prasoonds wrote: post #14

I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious. The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly l…

Is there any kind of limit to them besides the geofence? Can you get a Waymo at night? In the rain? I suppose it never snows there. How about roadworks? How do they react to vehicles with emergency signals? Can they follow directions of a cop in the street?

They are starting to obstruct bike lanes just like Ubers, I’ve seen this happen 3-4 times and it’s documented here: https://sfba.social/@SafeStreetRebel/112634004752866771

Years ago they were very respectful and conservative of basic road markings but clearly they have now ‘expanded capabilities’

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#188

Post by lambdaone »

notyourwork wrote: post #100
aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their…

Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to Alphabet.

Remember that the passenger cars are not the only thing that can scale; if you can automate the mapping and data preparation part of the process sufficiently, you may even be able to reduce it to mostly a matter of driving a few sensor cars around for a few weeks; maybe even cars that are adapted versions of your normal taxi vehicles, but with a human driver behind the wheel while you are mapping.

I would imagine that while Waymo's mapping efforts have been very human effort-intensive so far, they will be looking at developing this automatic map-making capability as a high priority for rolling out new cities. Scaling the rate of expansion is then mostly a matter of throwing hardware and compute at the problem.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#189

Post by choppaface »

whiplash451 wrote: post #142
aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their…

Waymo is in a better position because: 1. Robotaxi is a better target than general self-driving because the human baseline is much lower for robotaxis (most people dislike their experience with uber, while most people think that they are a better-than-average driver) 2. Google took the high road on safety. The move-slow-and-dont-break-things DNA of Google (that hurts them in so many domains) is a golden asset in self…

The main factor though is that California appears poised to hand them a monopoly.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#190

Post by mike_hearn »

notyourwork wrote: post #100
aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their…

Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to Alphabet.

Tesla is willing to sell to people who will pay $$$ for a self driving car. Waymo isn't. That's probably more important for now. Taxi drivers don't earn that much, and have some advantages AI can't easily replace (able to help with luggage, use petrol stations etc). Replacing them requires undercutting them which in turn means you can't generate a ton of revenue from that. Yet Waymo's business model, such that it is, has put them many billions into the red already. I wonder if anyone has done some ROI calculations and if so how long it'd take. The LIDARs alone would require a huge number of trips just to pay them off, then you have the cars, the decade+ of enormously high software development salaries... if Waymo were another YouTube where it could hide amongst Google's other profitable businesses that'd be one thing. As a separate business with its own accountings, how long will it take until it's turned a profit?
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