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A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

waymo.com

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Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#32
post #30
post #28

>high-fidelity data from 13 high-resolution cameras is it me or their example photo doesn't look even like 1 high-resolution camera (and very noisy at that, looks like a pretty high ISO setting). Their example looks similar and i'd say a bit worse than what my Fuji camera did 25 years ago in the dark after i'd adjust dynamic range of the image in GIMP. (and the cameras on the Waymo cars i see around have about the sa…

Absolutely not an expert on this, but I would imagine that they would train the pipeline on a raw-ish image data to have better consistency? I would think that some kind of algorithm "bettering" the image suddenly might cause a discontinuation in the pipeline that is harder to account for versus the ML machinery being trained to do this job as well. Also, what looks good to us may not be "good" to a machine. But I'm…

>they would train the pipeline on a raw-ish image data to have better consistency? I would think that some kind of algorithm "bettering" the image

of course, whatever "bettering" algorithm makes sense, the neural network would probably emerge it inside itself as a result of training. My comment was more about hardware in the sense that "garbage in - garbage out", and so you'd want to have a decent hardware which is available and pretty cheap today while Waymo seems to be using, i'm stating it politely :), very-very-commodity level.

>Also, what looks good to us may not be "good" to a machine.

the kernels of the first layers of visual CNNs (at least the ones i looked at) converge to the Gabor-like kernels what are in the first layers of the human visual cortex. Bunch of years ago, before deep-learning CNN, etc. i saw an article (in neurophysiology field) proving an optimality of such kernels for those visual tasks. Of course things may and probably diverge a lot in the deeper layers, yet deep dreaming, etc. suggests to me that the nature of the divergence may be less severe than expected.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#33
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".

30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.

Maybe it's different where you live, but 95% of the buses I see driving around here are completely empty.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#34
post #19
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.

Different 30 people in the US. I’d drop my car if Waymo was around and financially made sense. You’ll never catch me wasting my time on a bus though. We’ll never even be close to Europe or elsewhere wrt where public transit was even decades ago in those places. People here only ride the bus when there’s no other option for them. Waymo could make a bus too anyway, especially after they’ve been in an area a while and h…

Bus was just fine in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#35
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop. The current…

I don't think all of the economic benefit stays in NYC even when you take a yellow cab. A significant share of NYC taxi medallions are owned by entities based outside the city. Marblegate Capital in Connecticut owns about 2,146 medallions—nearly 16% of all NYC taxi medallions. They make more profit off the medallion financing business than actually operating the taxis which is basically break-even AFAIK.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's somewhere on Zorhan's to-do list :)

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#37
Custom silicon while it still looks like they've got multiple gaming PC's worth of compute gear mass isn't a flex when you remember what Tesla has with their FSD computer comparably just sipping power, while processing signals that are less straightforward as unscalable LiDAR

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#39
post #29
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.

An average bus load in the US is around 18 people. So if you just compute the raw bus emissions, then an electric bus is maybe about 2x more efficient than personal EVs. But wait, there's so much more! A single bus/subway ride costs about $20, which is a surprisingly consistent figure for various US cities. In NYC it's $17, for example. I'm talking about the _true_ cost, as in: "yearly operational budget divided by t…

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Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#40
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.

Maybe it's different where you live, but 95% of the buses I see driving around here are completely empty.

Are you near the city center, or out near the suburbs? It's common for a bus to be crowded on one part of the route and nearly empty at the end.
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