I would love to see more visibility into how this model’s simulation fidelity maps onto measurable safety improvements on public roads, especially in unusual edge conditions like partial sensor occlusion or atypical weather.
The Waymo World Model
401–410 of 699 posts
Re: The Waymo World Model
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. If you've ever driven a Tesla, it gives daily messages "the left side camera is blocked" etc.. cameras+weather don't mix either.
At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended up spreading HTML5. Now I just think he refused LIDAR on purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.
Years ago he called lidar a crutch...
And I agree, it is. Clearly it is theoretically possible without.
But when you can't walk at all, a crutch might be just what you need to get going before you can do it without the crutch!
Re: The Waymo World Model
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
depth estimation is but one part of the problem— atmospheric and other conditions which blind optical visible spectrum sensors, lack of ambient (sunlight) and more. lidar simply outperforms (performs at all?) in these conditions. and provides hardware back distance maps, not software calculated estimation
Lidar fails worse than cameras in nearly all those conditions. There are plenty of videos of Tesla's vision-only approach seeing obstacles far before a human possibly could in all those conditions on real customer cars. Many are on the old hardware with far worse cameras
Interesting, got any links? Sounds completely unbelievable, eyes are far superior to the shitty cameras Tesla has on their cars.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
His stated reason was that he wanted the team focused on the driving problem, not sensor fusion "now you have two problems" problems. People assumed cost was the real reason, but it seems unfair to blame him for what people assumed. Don't get me wrong, I don't like him either, but that's not due to his autonomous driving leadership decisions, it's because of shitting up twitter, shitting up US elections with handouts…
Sensor fusion is an issue, one that is solvable over time and investment in the driving model, but sensor-can't-see-anything is a show stopper. Having a self-driving solution that can be totally turned off with a speck of mud, heavy rain, morning dew, bright sunlight at dawn and dusk.. you can't engineer your way out of sensor-blindness. I don't want a solution that is available to use 98% of the time, I want a solut…
> Waymo had no choice but to solve the expensive problem of "Always Available and Safe"
And it's still not clear whether they are using a fallback driving stack for a situation where one of non-essential (i.e. non-camera (1)) sensors is degraded. I haven't seen Waymo clearly stating capabilities of their self-driving stack in this regard. On the other hand, there are such things as washer fluid and high dynamic range cameras.
(1) You can't drive in a city if you can't see the light emitted by traffic lights, which neither lidar nor radar can do.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who lives in the Bay Area we already have trains, and they're literally past the point of bankruptcy because they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations, (2) don't actually make people pay at all, and (3) don't actually enforce any quality of life concerns short of breaking up literal fights. All of this creates negative synergies that pushes a huge, mostly silent segment…
Maybe not BART but the new Caltrain electrification program seems to be a success and ridership and revenue are up
Re: The Waymo World Model
#406Re: The Waymo World Model
#407I don't get how this solves the problem of edge cases with self driving
Even if you can generate simulated training data, don't you still have the problem where you don't even know what the edge cases you need to simulate are in the first place?
Re: The Waymo World Model
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't they still using safety drivers or safety follow cars and in fewer cities? Seems Tesla is pretty far behind.
What do you think I said that you're contradicting? IMO the presence of safety chase vehicles is just a sensible "as low as reasonably achievable" measure during the early rollout. I'm not sure that can (fairly) be used as a point against them. I'm comfortably with Tesla sparing no expense for safety, since I think we all (including Tesla) understand that this isn't the ultimate implementation. In fact, I think it wo…
> IMO the presence of safety chase vehicles is just a sensible "as low as reasonably achievable" measure during the early rollout. I'm not sure that can (fairly) be used as a point against them.
Only if you're comparing them to another company, which you seem to be. So yes, yes it can.
Seriously, the amount of sheer cope here is insane. Waymo is doing the thing. Tesla is not. If Tesla were capable of doing it, they would be. But they're not.
It really is as simple as that and no amount of random facts you may bring up will change the reality. Waymo is doing the thing.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#409I don't get how this solves the problem of edge cases with self driving Even if you can generate simulated training data, don't you still have the problem where you don't even know what the edge cases you need to simulate are in the first place?
Well it certainly helps,doesn't it? This system is going to encounter more edge cases than a single human ever would. Hopefully the lessons from known unknowns generqlise to unknowns. And once they've been seen once they took can become part of the corpus.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#410Very concerned with this direction of training “counterfactual events such as whether the Waymo Driver could have safely driven more confidently instead of yielding in a particular situation.” Seems dicey. This could lead in the direction to a less safe Waymo. Since the counterfactual will be generated, I suspect that that the generations will be biased towards survivor situations where most video footage in its trai…
Driving is always a balance between speed and safety. If you want ultimate safety you just sit in the driveway. But obviously that isn't useful. So functionally one of the most important things a self-driving system will decide is "how fast is it safe to drive right now". Slower is not always better and it has to balance safety with productivity.