341–350 of 582 posts
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Tesla does not handle rain well either. This is not a LIDAR problem, it is a problem with self driving cars in general.
My Tesla can't even tell if it should turn the wipers on consistently or correctly. Let alone drive in the rain.
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Yea, even in the case they could match human level stereo depth perception with AI, why would they say "no" to superhuman lidar capabilities. Cost could be a somewhat acceptable answer if there wouldn't be problems with the camera only approach but there are still examples of silly failures of it. And if I remember correctly they also removed their other superhuman radar in their newer models, the one which in certai…
Because they don't have superhuman LIDAR. They never did. Nobody ever did. LIDAR input is not completely reliable so what do you do then?
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The EU already has. GDPR and the AI Act puts a lot of limits on what you can do in the open space, although it doesn't always go far enough.
And barely gets enforced
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No, it isn't "smarter." Camera-only driving is the product of a stubborn dogmatic boss who can't admit a fundamental error. "Just make it work" is a terrible approach to engineering.
Can hatred of Musk not derail this entire thread please? I have a camera-only ADAS that I think works quite well, but having both would be better.
It's significant that a truly hard problem like autonomous driving doesn't respond to a "brute force" management style. Rockets aren't in this category because the required knowledge and theory is fairly complete, whereas real autonomous driving is completely novel.
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Maybe. But Google has been there in a sensor laden car, overhead with an airplane, and buying all the access that is available in satellite imagery, and fusing that together in a continually updated model. Plus real time data from a billion maps and navigation users. I pity the fool going up against that.
I don't think Waymo is using Street View / satellite data to drive. They have to build an HD map using a special LIDAR-equipped vehicle before deploying in a new area. Maybe their navigation system will be better than the competition due to real-time traffic data from Google Maps users, but I don't think it'll be so much better as to be an unbeatable advantage.
> pricing below US $200. That’s less than half of typical prices now, and it’s not even the full extent of the company’s ambition.
This means there are sensors available for like $500 or more. At 4 per car, this is still just $2000, which is a very reasonable cost add even for a midrange car.
And with price comparisons like this, I'm sure Chinese competitors aren't factored in, I'm sure the Chinese have stuff for cheaper.
So Affordable Lidar is not a limitation. Despite that, self-driving doesn't really exist outside of Waymo, which people take to assume that Lidar is their killer advantage, but with other cars having Lidar, I think that might not turn out to be the deciding facotr.
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Karpathy provided additional context on the removal of LiDAR during his Lex Fridman Podcast appearance. This article condenses what he said: https://archive.is/PPiVG And here's one of Elon's mentions (he also has talked about it quite a bit in various spots). https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450?s=20 Edit: My personal view is that LiDAR and other sensors are extremely useful, but I worked on aircra…
Based on that list it boils down to 2 things it seems: - cost (no longer a problem) - too much code needed and it bloats the data pipelines. Does anyone have any actual evidence of this being the case? Like yes, code would be needed, but why is that innately a bad thing? Bloated data pipelines feels like another hand-wave when I think if you do it right it’s fine. As proven by Waymo. Really curious if any Tesla engin…
I would argue that yes, we do use vision but we get that "lidar depth" from our stereo vision. And that used to be why I thought cameras weren't enough.
But then look at all the work with gaussian splatting (where you can take multiple 2d samples and build a 3d world out of it). So you could probably get 80% there with just that.
The ethos of many Musk companies (you'll hear this from many engineers that work there) is simplify, simplify, simplify. If something isn't needed, take it out. Question everything that might be needed.
To me, LIDAR is just one of those things in that general pattern of "if it isn't absolutely needed, take it out" – and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that it isn't required. It's probably a nice to have, but maybe not required.
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RIP to every single camera in existence if that happens. Lidar is awful with damaging camera lenses.
I had to look this up, because I had never heard of it. How could a lens be damaged by infrared lasers? It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers. https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...
It's not safe just because it's infrared. And the claims that it's safe because of the exposure time is highly questionable, would you be okay with that for any other laser?
Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part. Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a…
I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsof…
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There are good arguments but this isn’t one. Many humans (like me!) drive fine without binocular vision. And the cars have many cameras all around, with wide angle lenses that are watching everything all the time, when a human can only focus in one direction at a time.
So your eye does not have an adjustable position and you cannot use mirrors?