> Simulation of the Waymo Driver evading a vehicle going in the wrong direction.
It really looks like waymo is the one going in the wrong direction and driving dangerously to evade traffic in this simulation.
The Waymo World Model
501–510 of 699 posts
Re: The Waymo World Model
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 w…
>Waymo is doing the thing. This worldview is overly simplistic. Waymo has (very shrewdly, for prospective investors at least) executed a strategy that most quickly scales to 0.1% of the population. Unfortunately it doesn't scale further. The cars are too costly and the mapping is too costly. There is no workable plan for significant scale from Waymo. Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly scales to 100% of…
> Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly scales to 100% of the population.
So, uh… where is this “scale” then? This “strategy” has been bandied about for better part of a decade. Why are they still in a tiny geofence in Austin with chase cars?
Waymo is doing it right now. Half a million rides every week, expansion to a dozen new cities. Tesla does a few hundred in a tiny area.
Scale is assessed by looking at concrete numbers, not by “strategies” that haven’t materialized for a decade.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vertical integration argument should apply to Grok. They have Tesla driving data (probably much more data than Waymo), Twitter data, plus Tesla/SpaceX manufacturing data. When/if Optimus starts on the production line, they'll have that data too. You could argue they haven't figured out how to take advantage of it, but the potential is definitely there.
"Tesla has more data than Waymo" is some of the lamest cope ever. Tesla does not have more video than Google! That's crazy! People who repeat this are crazy! If there was a massive flow of video from Tesla cars to Tesla HQ that would have observable side effects.
"More video" (gigabytes) is a straw man.
The key metric is more unusual situations. That scales with miles driven, not gigabytes. With onboard inference the car simply logs anything 'unusual' (low confidence) to selectively upload those needle-in-a-haystack rare events.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The better way to look at it imo is looking at the economic loss as well of congestion/abandoned commutes. To do a ridiculous hypothetical, London would collapse entirely if it didn't have transit. You're making my argument for me. Again, my concern isn't the day-to-day conveniences of funding, my point is that building a fragile system (a system where the funding is unrelated to the usability of the service) is a s…
But my point is that noone has a robust system according to you in Europe at least - the bar is so high to cover all operating costs with fares (or is that your point - if so I'm lost - I definitely would not recommend replacing European transit networks with nothing?). And National Rail isn't replaceable at all with bus/cars/planes. You really underestimate the number of people which commute >1hr into London (100km+…
>Are the trains themselves a fixed cost (they should last 30-40 years)?
Yes
>Is track maintenance a fixed cost (this has to be done more often than the trains themselves)
Yes
>Equally, are signalling upgrades (for example) fixed costs?
Yes
Fixed costs are the costs that don't go away when the passengers go away. Variable cost, typically labor, go away when you don't actually need that additional marginal train. You still have to amortize that train even if it's not on the tracks. You still need to buy that marginal train when the service levels require it. You still have to do track maintenance even when you're not running trains (though, yes, at the very margin there could be some small rate adjustments). When you want to upgrade the signals, it's basically the definition of a fixed cost, because you do it once and it's done.
>And National Rail isn't replaceable at all with bus/cars/planes. You really underestimate the number of people which commute >1hr into London (100km+). There is just no way to do that journey by car or bus. It would turn a ~1hr commute into a 3hr _each way_ and that's not even considering the complete lack of parking OR the fact suddenly the roads would be at (even more) gridlock with many multiples of commuters.
I don't want to speak to National Rail or British Rail that preceded it. I want to stick to the transit system that I know well.
My point here isn't that money shouldn't be spent on "getting things back in shape" here is where I waffle on the "pay for fixed capital costs and mostly have the marginal variable costs covered by the marginal rider." If a system needs the occasional cash infusion, I'm fine with that, as long as it comes with new leadership.
My concern here is that, in the Bay Area, many, many people are eager to pay $25 for a Waymo to pick them up (they are NOT cheap) while Muni costs $3 (a near 10x increase in cost). When folks are willing to pay that much of a premium, then something is very wrong with the transit system. Muni has had zero enforcement of their code of conduct for decades. When you have a system that are large section of the populous actively avoid when it's perfectly convenient, then something is very wrong with the system.
When I see BART stations that look like abandoned parking lots surrounded by single family home sprawl, then it doesn't surprise me that the system is not sustainable. The stations that may get removed are all in areas that require people to drive, to then take the train, instead of the cities zoning density and retail around the train stations. When I yell at the occasional people smoking in BART stations and I go to tell the station attendant and get a shrug back -- even when we are paying for them to have their own police force -- that's why they are failing. These are political choices that BART has made in how they operate their service
These systems aren't even doing the bare minimum in providing a reliable pleasant service, so people stop using them, and that makes sense. The entire point is that these services should be relatively inexpensive to operate because of economies of scale, but when you don't actually make people pay, when you don't actually ask people to behave like responsible adults, when your running the service like a failing business then we should expect the service to fail, and when it does, when bailouts are needed, they should (and often do) come with strings attached. BART now has gates that stop most turnstile jumping... and they were forced to be installed by the state of California as part of their second bailout. The reason I'm harping on having variable costs attached to ridership is exactly because the systems needs to be forced to respond when a sizable amount of people no longer find the service valuable.
This is about sustainability, because the marginal tax dollar is better spend on something like providing people with the healthcare they need than it is providing people a bus service they're not even willing to actually use.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#505Earlier 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.
> The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.
That’s true now, but when they first debuted they would have doubled the cost of the car.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#506By leveraging Genie’s immense world knowledge, it can simulate exceedingly rare events—from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant—that are almost impossible to capture at scale in reality. The model’s architecture offers high controllability, allowing our engineers to modify simulations with simple language prompts, driving inputs, and scene layouts. Notably, the Waymo World Model generates high-fidelity,…
Looks like they need to blackouts and parades to that simulator...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/waymo-paralyzed-parade-b...
Re: The Waymo World Model
#507Earlier 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…
over the long term, this is solved with a wealth tax, but undoing what rich ppl have done to society (i.e. making lots of poor people) will unfortunately take many, many years; so many years that it will never actually happen
My entire point is mostly not even about the money. It's about the system having to respond as a service to the fact that people don't want to use that service and are willing to pay a huge premium for alternatives like Waymo.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#508Earlier 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.
> purely aesthetic reasons
This is huge though.
People aren't setting them on fire during protests, and if an FSD Tesla plows into a farmers market, it might not even make the news.
People hate tech so much that self-driving companies with easy-to-spot cars have had to shut down after just a few mistakes.
Disguising Teslas as plain old regular human-driven cars is a great idea and I wouldn't be surprised if they win the market because of this. Even if they suck at driving.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ex-googler: I doubt it, but am curious for rationale (i know there was a round of PR re: him “coming back to help with AI.” but just between you and me, the word on him internally, over years and multiple projects, was having him around caused chaos b/c he was a tourist flitting between teams, just spitting out ideas, but now you have unclear direction and multiple teams hearing the same “you should” and doing it)
the rebuke is that lack of chaos makes people feel more orderly and as if things are going better, but it doesn't increase your luck surface area, it just maximizes cozy vibes and self interested comfort.
In Assistant having higher-ups spitting ideas and random thoughts ended up in people mistakenly assume that we really wanted to go/do that, meaning that chaos resulted in ill and cancelled projects.
The worst part was figuring what happened way too late. People were having trying to go for promo for a project that didn't launch. Many people got angry, some left, the product felt stale and leadership&management lost trust.
Re: The Waymo World Model
#510By leveraging Genie’s immense world knowledge, it can simulate exceedingly rare events—from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant—that are almost impossible to capture at scale in reality. The model’s architecture offers high controllability, allowing our engineers to modify simulations with simple language prompts, driving inputs, and scene layouts. Notably, the Waymo World Model generates high-fidelity,…
The idea is that, over time, the quality and accuracy of world-model outputs will improve. That, in turn, lets autonomous driving systems train on a large amount of “realistic enough” synthetic data. For example, we know from experience that Waymo is currently good enough to drive in San Francisco. We don’t yet trust it in more complex environments like dense European cities or Southeast Asian “hell roads.” Running t…
It's a pareto principal.
You can get 80% of the way to "perfect" with 20% of the effort.